Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, 1915. 198 pages. Translated by Else C.M. Benecke.

Why Polish Literature: A Personal Anecdote

Some years ago, I published a memoir in my university’s student literary journal, a rather grim piece, as memoirs by young adults often are,[note]When I assigned a memoir essay for a freshmen composition writing class, I learned that asking freshmen to write memoir essays is an invitation to morbidity, because to most young adults the easiest life event to narrate is the worst thing that ever happened to them.[/note] about a dismal trip I had taken with my father and brother to Ukraine and Poland when I was seventeen. There is a common saying that goes, “Don’t vomit on the page,” which does not so much mean don’t produce slipshod work as don’t publish personal matters that don’t need to be publicized; on the occasion of writing this memoir, I ignored that dictum. In the years since that essay, I’ve felt the style a little hackneyed (and necessitating a much deeper inquiry into the whole subject of style), but I also felt guilty of combining–in a rather silly way–the portentousness of Cormac McCarthy with the foreign travel voyeurism of Elizabeth Gilbert.[note]Where you go to a place for a brief period of time, see a minuscule part of the place you are visiting, and then feel free to caricature a whole region and its people merely because of your own limited experiences.[/note] In part to repent of and rectify my former ignorance,[note]As for “vomiting” my personal matters into print, this has turned out to be the part I’m least embarrassed by. As a document of who I was and what I felt, the piece holds up. I stand by most of what I wrote.[/note] and in part to satisfy my own curiosity, I’ve since made myself more familiar with this part of the world and have tried to learn about what inhabitants of Eastern Europe find endearing about their native land; a good way to do that as any, I think, is to read some Polish literature.[note]For a very comprehensive list of Polish works in English translation from before 1930, I refer you to this bibliography compiled by one Eleanor E. Ledbetter. For more of a general overview of the high points of the literature, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute’s Culture.pl website has a good guide.[/note] I started by reading three collections of stories by Polish authors translated by Else C.M. Benecke. The book introduced me to some of the major issues Polish authors were concerned with at the turn of the 20th century, and I made a couple discoveries to add to my gallery of admirable prose stylists.

“Bartek the Conqueror” by Henryk Sienkiewicz

For Americans and most Europeans living at the turn of the 20th century, the name that the term Polish literature called to mind was that of Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846 – 1916), whose historical novel Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero became a hit internationally, was translated into fifty languages, and has been adapted into film four times.[note]My Modern Library softcover of the novel is one of the earliest antique books I owned.[/note] Less known to English-speaking audiences is Sienkiewicz’s historical romance Trilogy (With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Sir Michael), compared by critics to War and Peace, which also contributed to Sienkiewicz being named the 1905 Nobel laureate in Literature “because of his outstanding merits as an epic writer.”

Stories by Polish Authors was the first of three collections of stories by Polish writers translated by Else C.M. Benecke (followed by More Polish Tales in 1916 and Selected Polish Tales in 1921). Benecke begins this first collection by offering readers a more bite-sized taste of Sienkiewicz[note]The only one of the four authors in the volume previously known to English-speaking readers, as a review in The Independent noted.[/note] in the form of his early novella “Bartek the Conqueror” (Bartek Zwycięzca, 1880). The story shows Sienkiewicz to be an entertaining writer, albeit one who is quite stylistically removed from all of the other authors Benecke anthologizes, a difference perhaps attributable to Sienkiewicz’s long affinity for the Romantic movement in Polish literature, and opposition to the late 19th-century move towards Naturalism (about which I’ll have more to say in a moment).

Bartek, the hero of the story, is a simple farmer from Pognębin, “a name given to a great many villages” in Poland. The whole of his life is bound up in “his land, his cottage and two cows, his own piebald horse, and his wife, Magda.” (He is, in other words, 19th century Poland’s equivalent of Joe Sixpack.) But Bartek’s small world is disrupted when the German authorities who control the area of Poland Bartek lives in[note]Which they had gained control of in the Congress of Vienna of 1815[/note] call the men of Bartek’s village up to fight in Prussia’s 1870 war with France. Sienkiewicz gives Bartek a sort of half-comical, half-endearing, Homer Simpson-esque persona. The reader is charmed by Bartek’s simple love of his wife and his home, as well as the greater skepticism and moral conscience of Magda. (This simpleton husband/savvy wife archetype lives on in any number of TV sitcoms.)

Magda, when she had read through the papers, began to swear:

‘May they be damned and die themselves! May they be blinded!—Though you are a fool—yet I am sorry for you. The French give no quarter; they will chop off your head, I dare say.’

Bartek felt that his wife spoke the truth. He feared the French like fire, and was sorry for himself on this account.

At the story’s beginning, Bartek knows only about his home and feels little loyalty to the Germans who control his section of Poland, but he and others from his village are called to fight in Germany’s war nonetheless. When on a troop transport headed to fight in the war with the French, Bartek asks his friend Wojtek, “What sort of people are these Frenchmen?”

Now there were three nations known to Wojtek: living in the centre were the Poles; on the one side were the Russians, on the other the Germans. But there were various kinds of Germans. Preferring, therefore, to be clear rather than accurate, he said:

‘What sort of people are the French? How can I tell you; they must be like the Germans, only worse.’

At which Bartek exclaimed: ‘Oh, the low vermin!’

When Bartek first encounters the French, he sees starving French prisoners of war. He realizes then that the French are hardly to be feared, that they too can be weak and vulnerable. There is a further problem, however, with the idea that the French are Germans, only worse, and that is that Bartek is fighting for the Germans! At the beginning of the story and while war is still raging, it is possible for Bartek to hold together these contradictory thoughts.

During the Bartek’s first action in the Battle of Gravelotte, the German lines start to collapse before the French onslaught and beat a hasty retreat–except for Bartek’s Polish regiment, who stand their ground. When the enemy draws near, the simple and courageous Bartek bursts into a fury, charges the enemy–“Magda will give it to you!” he shouts comically–and goes Beast-mode on two separate groups of French armed only with a flagpole, putting the enemy to flight, and establishing fame for himself as the Hero of Gravelotte. In the aftermath of the battle, Bartek is taken to personally meat Field Marshall Karl Friedrich von Steinmetz, who pins medals on him and congratulates him. But Bartek slips up and says the following in his naïveté:

‘Do you know why you are fighting the French?’
‘I know, Your Excellency.’
‘Tell me.’
Bartek began to stammer, ‘Because, because—’ Then on a sudden Wojtek’s words fortunately came into his mind, and he burst out with them quickly, so as not to get confused: ‘Because they are Germans too, only worse villains!’
His Excellency’s face began to twitch as if he felt inclined to burst out laughing.

Steinmetz, who was pondering whether to promote this battle hero to be an officer, quickly changes his mind, concluding that Bartek is too stupid. (This, it may be said, is meant to mirror the general German prejudice against the Poles.) But Bartek’s brush with the great general has the effect of changing his ways of thinking; he comes to view himself as part of the German army, and finds that he likes war and pillaging. Magda, meanwhile, is ever the conscience of her husband, writing in response to a braggadocious letter of his,

You yourself are a scoundrel, you heathen, going with those wretches to murder half a nation of Catholics. Do you not understand, then, that those wretches [the Germans] are Lutherans, and that you, a Catholic, are helping them? You like war, you ruffian, because you are able now to do nothing but fight, drink, and illtreat others, and to go without fasting; and you burn churches.

But Bartek goes on fighting, pillaging, and burning, buttressing his fame in two more major battles, until Germany is victorious and he is ready to return home. Before he leaves, however, he finds himself next to a barracks holding two prisoners waiting to be executed. They speak Polish, like him! The younger one mournfully tells how he fought for the French in the hopes of freeing Poland from her oppressors, the Germans. Bartek experiences a moral crisis in that moment. Should he set his compatriots free and risk being caught by his superiors and hung himself? He doesn’t go through with it, and instead watches as the two Poles are killed.

The war over, one would think that all would be well; but Bartek returns home in a terrible state, as a drunk. He tells his war stories to anyone who will listen to him at the tavern, while Magda is forced to take care of the farm and support her indolent husband. Unable to put up with it any longer, Magda comes to the tavern to confront her Bartek. He refuses to come home, saying haughtily that he met Steinmetz, he is a war hero. Magda cries out:

‘Oh, you men, you wretched men, do you see the disgrace and misery I am in? He came back, and I was glad to welcome him as a good man, but he came back drunk. He has forgotten God, and he has forgotten Polish. He went to sleep, he woke up sober, and now he’s drinking again, and paying for it with my money, which I had earned by my own work. And where have you taken that money from? Isn’t it what I have earned by all my trouble and slavery? I tell you men, he’s no longer a Catholic, he’s not a man any more, he’s bewitched by the Germans, he jabbers German, and is just waiting to do harm to people. He’s possessed….’

Here the woman burst into tears; then, raising her voice an octave higher:—’He was stupid, but he was good. But now, what have they done to him? I looked out for him in the evening, I looked out for him in the morning, and I have lived to see him. There is no peace and no mercy anywhere. Great God! Merciful God!—If you had only left it alone,—if you had only remained German altogether!’

Late into the night, the tavern now emptied from people not wanting to stay and watch this terrible row, Bartek finally leaves with his wife: “After her, hanging his head and following humbly enough, went the victor of Gravelotte and Sedan.” Meanwhile, there is an ever more encroaching presence of German colonists in Pognębin who have bought up all the best land and play an increasingly large role in the local government. One day, a local German named Boege beats Bartek’s son Franek, and so in retaliation Bartek attacks Boege. A mob of Germans chases after Bartek. (Sienkiewicz sardonically has them shout, “Hurrah!” the same cry that Bartek used when marching for the Germans into battle.) Bartek is arrested, put on trial, and, in spite of his earnest appeal that he is a war hero who served honorably in the German army and met Steinmetz, put in prison. The final chapter involves an effort by Magda to get a pro-reform Polish politician elected and get a more equal political representation for the native Poles within the German government. The ending has a desultory twist that makes one wonder if Sienkiewicz wished to show that Poles themselves could often be their own worst enemies.

Bartek the Conqueror is meant to represent the general experience of Poles under German control. The story goes like this: Poland was divided between Germany and Russia in 1815 at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The Poles living the German-controlled territory thought they would have equal rights and equal opportunities as member of the greater Prussia controlled by the Germans. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out, Polish soldiers like Bartek served in the ranks under German commanders, but were the German army’s most valiant soldiers and, as Sienkiewicz would have us believe, were a prime reason for German victory in the war. Despite serving honorably, however, the average Pole is betrayed by the Germans, who take their land, establish an unfair justice system, and prevent them from governing their own affairs. Even a great war hero like Bartek is made a victim of this unjust system, which is aided and abetted by his own naivete and provincial nature.

While Bartek the Conqueror is a quick and entertaining read, it is also one that tells a simple story with characters meant to embody the average Pole; the psychology of the characters is simple, the story not particularly nuanced. Its comic touches are the stuff of modern sitcoms and therefore do not lessen the broadness of its appeal. As a writer surveying Sienkiewicz’s body of work in The Contemporary Review put it, “On the whole, the impression which the talent of Sienkiewicz produces is one of breadth and vigour rather than of subtlety.”

“Twilight” and “Temptation” by Stefan Żeromski

If Sienkiewicz’s writing gives off a familiar impression–that of a national writer with broad appeal–Stefan Żeromski’s writing turns out to be something more jagged, crystalline, and beautiful. He is one of these poetic writers who aims for quickness, strength, vigor, violence. Two people, a man and a woman, are working, not in a sun-swept field, but in a dank marsh. The are the poorest of the poor, the dregs of society, but Żeromski zooms in with his writer’s eye, and gives us a minute sketch of every sensation crossing the mind of the woman, Walkowa:

It was that moment of twilight, when every form seems to be visibly reducing itself to dust and nothingness, when a grey emptiness spreads over the surface of the earth, looks into the eyes, and oppresses the heart with unconscious sorrow. Terror seized Walkowa. Her hair stood on end, and a shudder passed through her body. The mists rose like a living thing, stealthily crawling over towards her; they came up from behind, retreated, lay in wait, and again crept forward in more impetuous pursuit.

The danger of living so tenuously in nature, with a landlord who may or may not decided to pay Walkowa’s husband, Gibala, what the couple need to live on, is not greater than the terror of being a woman under the sway of a tyrannical, quick-to-anger husband:

She knew what his anger meant; she knew that he could catch a man under the ribs, gather up his skin in handfuls, and, having shaken him once or twice, throw him down like a stone among the rushes. She knew he was capable of tearing the handkerchief from her head, twisting her hair in a knot round his fist and dragging her in terror along the road; or, in a fit of absent-mindedness, of pulling his spade out of the swamp quickly, and cutting her across the head without considering—whether it had hit, or not hit her.

“Twilight” is really no more than a sketch of a brief moment in time, and yet what Żeromski does with that moment in time is just as dramatic as what Sienkiewicz does in the entirety of Bartek. Żeromski is far more of a naturalist than Sienkiewicz is–he shows readers both the ugly as well as the beautiful parts of experience–but he is just a much of a moralizing writer as Sienkiewicz. With Sienkiewicz, the moral element is in rallying the whole of the Polish people with stories that represent that national story. With Żeromski, the experiences of the characters are far more individuated. “Twilight” is a punctuated moment inside the head of a specific character–Wolkawa. It is not a general story about Wolkawa and her husband; and yet it is only by putting the reader into the head of a particular character, a move towards Modernism, that we are able to see the moral truths borne out of individual experience.

“Temptation” is another punctuated moment presented by Żeromski, though too brief and insubstantial to give any fair idea of what the author is about. Subsequently to reading this collection, I read Żeromski’s fine novel, The Faithful River, which shows a marked amplification of the powers he shows here.[note]I will post a review of it shortly.[/note]

“Srul—from Lubartów” by Adam Szymański

One fascinating concern in Polish literature which was not known to me prior to reading this collection is the story of the Polish Sybiraks. In the aftermath of two unsuccessful Polish revolts in the 19th century against Russian rule, the November Uprising of 1830-1831 and the January Uprising of 1863-1864, tens of thousands of Polish political prisoners were exiled to Siberia. They were resettled in a vast, harsh, but often beautiful wilderness of lakes, mountains, and taiga forests. They were not alone; several indigenous groups already populated these areas, the Tungus, the Yakutsk, and the Chuckchee, who sold furs and kept herds of reindeer. The two latter contributors to the collection, Adam Szymański and Wacław Sieroszewski, were both Polish exiles to this area of the world.

Adam Szymański does not, on the evidence of “Srul—from Lubartów” or the two stories of his included in More Tales by Polish Authors, distinguish himself by any particular style. As a student and a rather young man, we are told, he was exiled to Siberia and based on his experienced there produces his Siberian Sketches, which the three translated stories of his are drawn from. Yet what these stories have in common is a profound emotional appeal, a dramatization of the essential longing for home. “Srul—from Lubartów” is basic in that way. The narrator is in the cold wastes of the East, where “only miserable yurta were to be seen, no large buildings, nothing even distantly approaching the populous villages in Poland, which are so cheerful in autumn.” One day, he is visited by a Jew (who, being a Pole of this time, Szymański is obliged to present in a somewhat stereotypical way.)

Normally a Jew would be an unwelcome visitor, and the narrator greets him coldly. Yet as the Jewish man asks the narrator a series of cryptic questions, the narrator has a revelation of their common sentiments.

But I did not answer him now. I no longer doubted that this old fanatical Jew was pining for his country just as much as I was, and that we were both sick with the same sickness. This unexpected discovery moved me deeply, and I seized him by the hand, and asked in my turn:

‘Then that was what you wished to talk to me about? Then you are not thinking of the people, of your heavy lot, of the poverty which is pinching you; but you are longing for the sun, for the air of your native country!… You are thinking of the fields and meadows and woods; of the little songsters, for whom you could not spare a moment’s attention there when you were busy, and now that these beautiful pictures are fading from your recollection, you fear the solitude surrounding you, the vast emptiness which meets you and effaces the memories you value? You wish me to recall them to you, to revive them; you wish me to tell you what our country is like?…’

The story ends abruptly, with the narrator beginning to tell the Jew tales of the old country. It’s possible this piece was meant to serve merely as an introduction to the Siberian Sketches, for it is rather slight as it is.

“In Autumn” and “In Sacrifice to the Gods” by Wacław Sieroszewski

The two contributions by Wacław Sieroszewski make a much more significant impression than that of Adam Szymański. The much older Sieroszewski does not so much pine for Poland in his stories as enmesh himself in the culture of the indigenous peoples native to the regions. His two stories in this collection present a wonderful picture of the lifestyle and customs of the Tungu and Yakutsk people, and Sieroszweski has a picturesque style comparable to some of the wilderness romances of Chateaubriand.

At the beginning of “In Autumn,” the narrator leaves the scene of an argument between the father and mother of the Yakutsk family he has been staying with and goes walking into the forest. He relates with painterly strokes the serene albeit frightening elements of the taiga, the stories of forest demons and people who walk in all directions only to end up in the same place they started. The narrator himself is lost until he happily comes to a lake where a Yakutsk friend of his is out on the water in his boat. They converse along the way to the nearest settlement, and the reader learns that the local people make their living by fishing and trading furs. They arrive at the village and the reader is introduced to Chachak, a man known as the greatest fighter of bears in those parts. The bears are fearsome creatures, known to the Yakutsk as the “Lords of the Forest,” but Chachak is not afraid of them; or he wasn’t, until in the recent past he had an encounter with a bear where he was almost killed. Chachak is getting older and less capable, yet he is still confident in his ability. The sketch ends with Sieroszewski relating that Chachak later died in an encounter with some bears.

In the longer story, “In Sacrifice to the Gods,” we are shown a village of Tungus in crisis. Normally the Tungus would have a yearly festival where they slaughtered the reindeer they had been raising so they could sell the skins to Western traders. This year, however, a plague has been killing off the reindeer and causing surrounding villages of Tungus to starve to death. The people of the village wonder if they are next, until the arrival of the elder Seltichan and his regal family. But a terrible sacrifice will have to be made in order to placate the gods that are ravaging the Tungu people. It is difficult to characterize the story’s rather gripping denouement, other than to say that it is clear that Sieroszewski absorbed a great deal of the culture and mythology of the Tungus in his time living among them, and he treats their traditions–however strange to his Polish readers–with the utmost seriousness. He is a writer I would certainly like to read more of, and his Escape From Siberia is on my to-read list.