# Poland: A Study of the Land People and Literature/Part 2/Chapter 3

III
Oppression has now reached its greatest height in Russian Poland since the partition of the kingdom. So complete is the gagging of the press that the refutation of the arguments in Bismarck's speeches, or any attack upon them, was strictly forbidden. No one even dared to show that the Polish agitation with which, according to the prince, it was necessary to contend, for very good reasons only consisted in an unbroken determination to maintain the nationality and language against the foreign conqueror, who, on his side, sets the whole machinery of state in operation, and uses all its powers.
The aim of the government in Russian Poland, as already mentioned, is especially directed to two objects: the Russianising of the ownership of the soil, and the eradication of the Polish language.
The ukase of 1865, which has been spoken of, forbade the Poles in the old Polish provinces to devise their land to any others than their children. In March 1886, however, the Russian Courts hit upon a decision of even broader import, since a will in which a Lithuanian proprietor had left his estate to his son was declared invalid, and the land was sold by auction.
In the Kingdom of Poland it is still permitted to speak Polish in the open street, and to write a notice in Polish, provided that above it the same is written in Russian; but anywhere outside of the so-called kingdom—in the whole of Lithuania towards the north, and in the south as far as Odessa—everywhere, where culture and language in the ​cultivated classes are still Polish, in and on all public buildings a notice is posted with the words: "The speaking of Polish is forbidden." The violation of the prohibition is punished severely, and every functionary, even to the lowliest, who is reported to have said a few words in Polish, even as an answer to a question in Polish, even to persons who do not understand any other language, is punished with heavy fines or dismissal. A tramcar conductor was recently fined twenty-five rubles—more than his month's pay—for having answered a Polish question in the same language.
Just imagine a trial in Russian Poland. The magistrate, who is generally a Pole by birth, and speaks Russian with difficulty and with a bad accent, questions in his Russian the accused, a Polish peasant, who does not understand a word of the judge's speech. The questions are therefore translated by an interpreter. He answers in Polish. New translation by the interpreter, unnecessary as it is, and thus questions and answers continue, because neither magistrate nor accused is permitted to speak his native language. And at the public trial the prosecuting counsel speaks against the accused in a language which the latter understands no more than what his counsel says in his behalf.
The Kingdom of Poland, where the language is still allowed, and where the Code Napoléon is still in force, seems to the inhabitants of the other provinces comparatively a paradise of freedom. They go from Wilna to Warsaw for a few weeks every year to breathe freely.
He who has experienced the state of things in this paradise of freedom can draw his own conclusions as to what it is in the provinces.
So far as education is concerned, the parents keep their little boy or girl at home and out of school as long as possible, teach them themselves, or have them taught, in order to give the first elements of knowledge in Polish and in the Polish spirit. The child sucks in with his mother's milk contempt for the Russians, and passionate hatred for them. Everything which the child hears in the first years of his life strengthens this hatred and contempt. He learns so much that is great and good about the superior culture ​and exalted courage of his countrymen that he attributes everything great to Poland and the Poles. "Is it possible that Columbus was not a Pole?" asked a little boy of his mother in my presence. On the other hand, as a rule everything which the child learns or experiences with regard to the Russians is unfavourable, or it receives an unfavourable interpretation. The Russian officers are unobtrusive in their bearing in public places; they are generally seen alone, seldom two and two. It is not the custom as it is in other armies for them to greet each other when they meet. Their behaviour is not in the least arrogant; they rather seem oppressed by their situation as the detested representatives of the ruling race. But the uniform is unpopular; the Poles do not give the officers credit for their modesty, they take it rather as proof of consciousness of intellectual inferiority. And a single little incident like this, that the carriage of the Russian general, on leaving a public ball, breaks the established row of carriages and goes ahead, arouses the bitter feeling of living in a land conquered by an enemy.
There is, of course, a Russian colony in Warsaw, but there is no real Russian society on account of the great disparities in rank among the Russians who live there. They cannot accept each other as equals. And here, as elsewhere, the Russian officials do not bear the highest characters. In addition to which, the better-class Russians think themselves too good to accept posts in Poland. They shrink from the odium attached to the calling.
A few years ago a Russian was appointed Professor of Zoology at the Warsaw University. He arrived, and was shown over the museum of stuffed animals. He noticed that the names on the labels were in Latin and Russian only. "Why not in Polish?" he asked. The Rector of the University explained to him that he had been sent to Warsaw not primarily to give instruction in zoology—it was comparatively unimportant whether the students learned much or little of the subject—but to carry on the Russian propaganda. The new Professor then inquired when the next train left for St. Petersburg, and departed incontinently. ​In the same way the leading Russian actress declined to go to Warsaw with the imperial troupe, and declared she would not act there until she might do so in Polish. But such cases are exceptional.
On the other hand, there are incidents of the very opposite description, which a Polish child daily witnesses and hears discussed in his home. Hatred of the Muscovite (Moskal) becomes a part of his nature.
He is finally sent to school, that is, he has to be given up to the Russian state, to Russian teachers. In his own home his mother has always dressed him in the Polish national costume, which is not allowed in the street. He has lived with picture-books and paintings which have shown him scenes of the past history of Poland, of the revolutions of this century, of the march of the exiles to Siberia; he knows the career of Poland minutely. In school the boy is dressed in Russian uniform, is addressed only in Russian, is never allowed to speak a single word that is not Russian, never hears anything about Poland or Polish literature, or if it is mentioned at all, it is spoken of as something prohibited, evil. He learns here that he is Russian, and nothing else than Russian. What confusion in the child's soul! The boy is compelled to be a hypocrite, to tell lies. The seeds of defiance and self-restraint, or of falsehood and flattery, are planted in his soul. Desperate questions as to whether resistance is of any use, whether justice exists, necessarily arise.
The schools are bad. The circumstance that the whole instruction is given in a foreign language, and that an inordinate stress is laid upon the acquirement of it; the dislike and constraint, which are the result thereof; lastly, the habit of looking on the teacher as a foreigner and an enemy have a great effect in diminishing the result. There is a minority of the students who understand French, and speak it well; a certain number understand and speak the language of the frontier—German; but the majority are barely able to read foreign books, and many do not understand a simple question in French or German. Those who are well-to-do go to foreign lands to study; if they cannot ​obtain permission for this they prefer to go to St. Petersburg, where they find less restraint and better professors, rather than remain in Warsaw, where the university instruction as a rule is bad.
When the University was suddenly transformed from Polish to Russian, those professors who did not know Russian asked leave to retire. Several of them remained, however, chiefly from patriotic reasons. But by degrees the University was purged, and the Polish professors were replaced by Russians, or by those who were favourable to Russia. The regulation has been made that after twenty-five years' service a professor can be dismissed, unless the faculty specially desire to retain him. They never desire to retain an eminent Polish professor. Thus, last year, Baranowski, the first medical professor of the University, received his dismissal as coming within the limit, although, since he was very young when he was appointed, he was just fifty years old and in full possession of his powers. As Professor of Æsthetics and the History of Literature, passing by the deserving and sound historian of literature, Piotr Chmielowski, they have appointed a certain Struwe, the only man who could be found who would speak Russian. Sometimes he succeeds in obtaining three auditors.
The halls are so small that none of them hold over a hundred, and not one of them is ever full.
The students have to wear a uniform like the pupils of schools, and they are under strict supervision. It is naturally forbidden to them to form any union whatsoever. They are not allowed to stand in a knot on the street, and if they even assemble at all in private to the number of six or seven, they are sure to be reported and punished; for everything is known. No one goes in or out of a house unseen. Latch-keys are unknown—and there is no northern institution one can speak of which astonishes an inhabitant of Russian Poland more than the latch-key. "Does the government allow such things?" they ask, with amazement. Every one, even the master of the house, must ring at his door, and the porter (Stroz), who corresponds to the Russian Dvornick, and whose duty it is to be responsible for ​the safety of the inmates, invariably serves also as an instrument of the police.
Thus the students are driven to study alone, but this is also made difficult. A great many of the most celebrated foreign works, as well as the most important of the literature of their own land, are forbidden, and must be got over the frontier as smuggled goods, which on the one hand increases the cost and on the other is dangerous. Therefore it cannot be wondered at that among the more intelligent of these young men there are found many with far-reaching anti-governmental views.
There are no Nihilists among them: neither the name nor the thing is known in Poland. The most advanced among them fall into two groups. Some call themselves democrats and some socialists. The democrats hold the views which are supported in Prawda. Still, their chief interest is not social or political, but purely intellectual. They constitute the first free-thinking group of this century in Poland. But as Catholicism and the power of the clergy from remote times have had their support in the Polish aristocracy, which represents the national tradition, and as the press of the aristocracy, especially the newspaper Slowo, is the organ of Catholicism, free-thinking allies itself with democratic inclinations and aims.
The young men who hold democratic views would like to introduce into Poland modern thoughts, views, theories and books. They would like to translate even the trivial protests of Max Nordau, if they were not afraid of the censor. Their strongest speaker, Swientochowski, is about forty years old, handsome, clear-eyed, stubborn, with a head like that of a provincial Christ, a poet and a fine writer, and, above all, a character. He has great qualities as a controversialist and as a didactic author, but his dogmatism causes him to be easily involved in squabbles, and he lacks grace and tact. His chief task is a war against the Catholic clergy. But an attack upon the clergy in Poland, even more than elsewhere, is an unpopular thing, because the nationality of the country has been for so long a time bound up with the Romish religion, and because the religious difference even now— ​since the educational standard of the people is so low—makes the strongest bulwark of the nation.
Then it also appears—albeit it is denied and the adherents of Prawda do not like to hear it—that the censor is more indulgent to this paper than to any other. It has permission to say things which would be forbidden to any other journal. For everything which tends towards cosmopolitanism and which undermines the Catholic church is far less dangerous to Russia than the nationalistic religious tendency. The influence of the Roman Church still appears to Russia its chief enemy and chief danger.
There is only one power in Poland which Russia persecutes and fears to the same degree, perhaps even more, and that is—singularly enough—Socialism.
I have said that there is a group among the studious youth who call themselves Socialists; a large number of the woi king people are of the same mind through the influence of the socialistic thought of Germany. I believe that these so-called Socialists among the students are of the highest class, the best informed, the most enthusiastic and devoted; they are mostly young doctors who have acquired modern science, and who by reading at first or at second hand have become disciples of Karl Marx. They feel keenly the existing injustice of the conditions of society. They realise that, even if Poland per impossibile should become free, little or nothing would be gained if the aristocracy or the clergy should continue to exercise the ruling influence, and capital should continue lo exploit those who own no property. They have nothing against the Russians as Russians, and dream vaguely of allying themselves with the revolutionary elements in Russia, of which indeed they know nothing. They pay dearly for the perilous and wholly Platonic sympathy for Socialism which they cherish. For every student who is accused or suspected of socialist propagandism is sent relentlessly to the castle, even if he has not been guilty of the smallest illegality.
It is the danger threatening from Russian socialism which makes the government so anxious about that of Poland. The five political criminals who were hanged in the prison of Warsaw at the end of January were Russians. The case, ​which came to an end here, turned upon a conspiracy organised by an inferior magistrate by the name of Bardowski, a political plot wholly without a prospect of success. The conspirators had drawn up socialist proclamations, which were to be given to the working people of Warsaw; they had stabbed a cigar dealer, in whose shop one of them, an engineer by the name of Kunicki, had been stupid enough to forget the protocol with the names of all the conspirators, and who in his anxiety had taken the book to a police station.
Very little appeared against the accused, so little that the Governor-General of Poland—the celebrated General Gurko, who is of Polish descent, and whose name properly pronounced is the Polish Hurko—after the sentence of death was pronounced, twice sent the papers to St. Petersburg with the declaration that he could not see how they could condemn these men to death. Since the death sentence was nevertheless confirmed, the governor, who is humane without on that account being known as soft-hearted, acted as follows. He caused the condemned persons to be awakened early one morning, and they were then told that they were sentenced to banishment, and must therefore take leave of their relatives, and if they desired it, see a priest to prepare them for their long journey. They all declared that they did not desire to communicate with any minister of religion. One of them wished to say good-bye to his father, who was sent for. They were then taken to a closed room, where the execution was to take place. The sentence was pronounced there, and at the same moment the executioners seized them and hanged them in the room.
It is most significant that two Russian officers who were condemned to death, but who at the last moment had their sentence commuted to hard labour in the mines for life—which is virtually the death punishment, since no one can endure it for more than four or five years—were not guilty of anything whatever except that they had received some pamphlets and proclamations from Bardowski, which they had not shown to any one, so far as could be proved, much less sought to distribute, but which were found in their houses.
​So dangerous is it to have socialistic writings in one's custody.
However, no Pole ought to hazard freedom and life for the sake of socialistic ideas. For in general it may be said, though young men with socialist sympathies in Warsaw are, strangely enough, surprised to hear one maintain it, that there is no sense in a Pole being a Socialist. For what does Socialism mean, shortly expressed? What else than directly or indirectly, the expropriation of private rich men, capitalists and landed proprietors, for the advantage of the State? But translate this into Polish, and it becomes under the conditions that prevail now, and have long prevailed, absolutely nothing else than the expropriation of Polish rich men for the advantage of the Russian State. But whatever the Russian State has once annexed may be called a thing of the past. It would require a strong faith to think that it would ultimately profit the Polish common people, when one lives in a city like Warsaw, where there is no municipal government, and where the revenues of the municipality go straight to St. Petersburg and only an extremely small portion thereof is used for the city's own advantage.
The only thing the Polish Socialist actually can do is therefore to excite the workmen against their employers, arouse their discontent, and lead them on to strikes which almost always end in defeat. Since election does not exist, so to speak, and a real party can never be formed, all socialist action on a larger scale is impossible, wholly apart from its ruinous effect upon the individuality of the Polish people.
A similar consideration to that which ought to prevent a thoughtful and prudent Pole from placing himself on the side of the Polish Socialists, even if he is otherwise inclined to socialistic theories, should prevent him from giving his full support to the free-thinking group in Poland.
One can be as good an European as any one, one may despise all the chauvinism, which as national conceit merely stupefies a people, and still regard the forcible annihilation of a rich and valuable national individuality as a misfortune for the whole of Europe.
It seems to me as if all other questions in Poland must ​be subordinate to this first and most important: the preservation of the nationality. But at a time like this, when it is absolutely forbidden to establish Polish schools, or to give peasants or the lower classes national instruction of any kind, a comprehensive free-thinking agitation, which would paralyse the Catholic faith, would also paralyse Polish national feeling. Unquestionably there are Protestant Poles in Posen and scattered in Russian Poland numerous united churches, which (in spite of the fact that their priests are married and their relations with Rome looser than those of the Roman Catholics) feel themselves to be very good Poles; but this is the consequence of the power of a tradition.
A rupture with the religious tradition at this period, if it could be brought about among the masses, would always be a victory for the Russian principle.
To be called a democrat has no sound meaning either, unless the word expresses the opinion that the masses of the people ought to rule. It is rather fruitless to cherish this opinion so long as nobility and peasantry are in an equal degree under the whip of the foreigner. All that the democrats are able to accomplish is to oppose the influence of the large landed proprietors, by election of the parish council in the country, and of the managers in private undertakings, a good and useful thing, in so far as it arouses a feeling of independence among the people, a cause of less undoubted profit, in so far as it lightens for the Russians the labour of breaking the power of resistance of the higher classes.
A dreadful dilemma presents itself to the Polish intelligence: it seems condemned either to choose progress, with the danger of playing into the hands of its own worst enemy, and the worst enemy of all progress, or to choose stagnation, with the danger that the nationality which is thereby preserved, and of which its sons were and are so proud, should drop behind in the culture of Europe, becoming antiquated and outstripped.
There is something really tragic in this situation. More than one man, who represents the Polish intelligence in its highest development, sees himself—like the proud Count Henrik in Krasinski's tragedy—condemned to defend the ​citadel of the Holy Trinity. These men are modern men, and they are silent on the subject. They are free-thinkers, and if as landed proprietors in Posen they have seats in the German Parliament and the Prussian Herrenhaus, they vote invariably with the centre. There are those among them who would very gladly dine with a socialist leader like Viereck, and yet officially follow Windhorst's flag. They know Heinrich Heine by heart and belong to the Catholic party. They are free-thinkers, and as Poles feel themselves compelled to support Rome—an intellectual torment which is not known anywhere else.
And in all domains it is manifest how patriotic or supposed patriotic struggles repress modern intellectual life: in the plastic arts, where patriotic allegories and symbols have too long usurped the place of pictures of real life, and in literature, where the historical romance still blossoms, a late aftermath of Walter Scott. The writer of greatest narrative talent among the living authors of Poland, Henryk Sienkiewickz, made his début with excellent modern novels; gradually associating himself with the Catholic party, he has taken up the line of great patriotic historical romances in the style of The Three Musketeers, with endless sequels. He regards it as his task in view of the depressing present to show the people the image of a past, when it still existed as a nation, and he prefers to describe the most unhappy period of the old history of Poland, in order to strengthen the people's faith in the surmountableness of the existing wretched condition by pictures of the terrible crises of bygone days. Nevertheless, in spite of all his talent, the result is that when from times which he knows he goes back to times which he does not know, and works with an aim entirely different from that of art before his eyes, he generally falls so far short as an author that he loses his best readers, and his novels are only successful as a means of amusement, or as stimulants to patriotic feeling.
Just as socialist and democratic or free-thinking tendencies do not mean the same in Poland as elsewhere, so also Catholic and conservative leanings have a special character here.
​In German literature, for instance, the Catholic tendency of Romanticism in this century is sharply opposed to the Protestant form of the earlier literature and the purely pagan bias of contemporary literature; but in Poland, Catholicism in this century has always been in opposition, in constant, restless conflict with the power of the State, frequently blended with that love for the truth which emancipates, and with that enthusiasm which exposes to martyrdom. In Protestant countries the clergy are as a rule servile; in Poland they never are and never can be degraded into tools of temporal power.
There are Catholic priests whom their superiors permit to write in newspapers, to visit the theatres and participate in social life, because it is known that they are wholly absorbed in the double object of exercising charity and of keeping the language of Poland alive in the most remote provinces. People close their eyes to infringements of the Catholic ritual among them, nay, even at a probable disbelief in certain dogmas, because they know them to be zealous supporters of Catholicism as the intellectual Polish national power. The stamp of comparatively innocent hypocrisy, which unquestionably adheres to them, injures them only among the few. General opinion regards them favourably.
As may be seen, according to my opinion, the point of view for the appraisement of the different parties and intellectual powers, which the foreigner feels himself compelled to adopt, is this: how far do they offer a greater or lesser power of resistance to the principle which aims by all means at breaking down the individuality of the people, the new and fearful principle of Asiatic absolute monarchy? It will be only when the danger which is threatened herefrom is removed that Poland can afford the luxury of measuring the different aims of the times by a new and sounder standard. But so long as this principle triumphs, so long will this dismembered and tortured Poland be the unquestioned representative of humanity as opposed to it, the advance post of civilisation, even in domains where its form is not modern, and so long will the tattered flag with the white eagle of ancient Poland remain the old unique, adorable banner of freedom.