page_title: Poles
section_title: Positivism
hierarchical_section_title: Poles / Culture / Literature / Positivism
caption_attribution_description: Photograph of Boleslaw Prus (1847-1912).
context_page_description: The Poles, commonly referred to as the Polish people, are a Central European nation native to Poland who share a common history, culture, and are speakers of the Polish language.
  The population of self-declared Poles in Poland is estimated at 37,394,000 out of an overall population of 38,538,000, of whom 36,522,000 declared Polish alone. A wide-ranging Polish diaspora exists throughout Europe, the Americas, and in Australasia. Today, the largest urban concentrations of Poles are within the Warsaw and Silesian metropolitan areas.
  The ethnic Polish people are considered to be the descendants of ancient West Slavic Lechites and other tribes that inhabited the Polish territories in late antiquity. Poland's recorded history dates back over a thousand years to c. 930–960 AD, when the Western Polans – an influential tribe in the Greater Poland region – united various Lechitic clans under what became the Piast dynasty, thus creating the first Polish state. The subsequent Christianization of Poland by the Catholic Church, in 966 CE, marked Poland's advent to the community of Western Christendom.
context_section_description: In the wake of the failed January 1863 Uprising against Russian occupation, a new period of thought and literature, Polish "Positivism", proceeded to advocate level-headedness, skepticism, the exercise of reason, and "organic work".  "Positivist" writers argued for the establishment of equal rights for all members of society; for the assimilation of Poland's Jewish minority; and for defense of western Poland's population, in the German-occupied part of Poland, against the German Kulturkampf and the displacement of the Polish populace by German colonization.  Writers such as Bolesław Prus sought to educate the public about a constructive patriotism that would enable Polish society to function as a fully integrated social organism, regardless of external circumstances. Another influential Polish novelist active in that period was Henryk Sienkiewicz who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905. The Positivist period lasted until the turn of the 20th century and the advent of the Young Poland movement.
caption: Bolesław Prus, author of Pharaoh
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon PowerShot SD600", "Image XResolution": "180", "Image YResolution": "180", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2008:02:10 16:08:53", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image Tag 0x1001": "2816", "Image Tag 0x1002": "2112", "Image ExifOffset": "266", "Image CustomRendered": "Normal", "Image ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "Image WhiteBalance": "Auto", "Image DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "Image SceneCaptureType": "Portrait", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "180", "Thumbnail YResolution": "180", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "2932", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3614", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/640", "EXIF FNumber": "49/10", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2008:02:10 16:08:53", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2008:02:10 16:08:53", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "3", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "149/16", "EXIF ApertureValue": "147/32", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "147/32", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "88", "EXIF FocalLength": "87/5", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2112", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2816", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "2112000/169", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "112640/9", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera"}