LITMIR.BIZ

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the end of the fifteenth century over 80 per cent of the 6,000 parishes in Wielkopolska and Małopolska had schools. The resultant upsurge in literacy was no doubt responsible for a literary flowering which took place at the same time. The first Polish lyric poet, Klemens Janicki (1516-43), was born a peasant but entered the priesthood and studied at the universities of Bologna and Padua, where he was crowned poet laureate by Cardinal Bembo. More typical was Mikołaj Rej of Nagłowice (1505-69), a country gentleman who wrote in robust Polish on religious, political and social issues. He was one of half a dozen notable poets, but they were all overshadowed by one figure who dominated the second half of the century.

      Jan Kochanowski (1530-84) studied at Kraków, Königsberg and Padua, and then spent some years at court while considering a career in the Church. He was prolific and imaginative, and his use of Polish, a language he did more than any other to enrich, was masterful and refined. While he is best known for his lyrical verse and court poems, his rendering of the psalms of David, and above all the threnody he composed on the death of his three-year-old daughter, Kochanowski did not avoid the political subjects popular with other writers. He too was preoccupied with the good of the Commonwealth. This comes out strongly in his only attempt at drama. Although there was dramatic entertainment at court from the 1520s and a number of troupes active around the country (and, from 1610, a playhouse in Gdańsk in which English actors performed Shakespeare), it was not a favoured medium. Kochanowski’s short play The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys is the only exception. The characters in the play are not really people, but in effect the voices of collective interests, and the play is not about their feelings, but about the fate of Troy. This curious use of dramatis personae to represent the collective foreshadows nineteenth—and twentieth-century Polish drama, the mainstream of which is neither lyrical nor psychological, but ethical and political.

      The state of mind defined in the words of these writers is a curious mixture of ideological bombast, emotional sincerity and healthy cynicism. The three co-exist with the two most pervasive themes. One is the almost obsessive feeling of responsibility for and compulsion to participate in the organic life of the Commonwealth at every level. The other is the quest for Arcadia. If political writing rested on the myth of an ‘ideal condition’ which had been perverted and must be restored, the literary imagination translated this into a quest for the state of innocence as epitomised by country life. This gave rise to a long tradition of Sielanki, a word the poet Szymon Szymonowicz (1558-1629) coined to express bucolic idylls. The sielanka theme haunted Polish thought and literature, sometimes assuming the aspect of a cult. Inspired by the quest for a lost innocence, which implied a rejection of corruption, it could take many forms. In the minds of the nineteenth-century Romantics, for instance, it would become confused with the quest for the lost motherland, and imply a rejection of political reality. More often, it took the form of intellectual withdrawal from the world, which at its worst exalted intellectual escapism and made the spirit of enquiry suspect.

      There is a strong, if indefinable, connection between these states of mind and Poland’s place in European culture. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Poles were as widely travelled as the citizens of any nation. Polish and foreign painters, sculptors and musicians likened Polish cities and palaces to those of Europe. Kochanowski knew Ronsard, Stanisław Reszka and others were friends of Tasso, and a considerable number of Poles were closely associated with Erasmus of Rotterdam. Leonard Coxe, who taught at Cambridge and the Sorbonne before becoming professor at the Jagiellon University, remarked in a letter to an English friend that the Poles walked, talked, ate and slept Erasmus, beginning with the King, who wrote to him in a familiar style usually reserved for sovereign princes.

      The literature of other countries was avidly read in Poland, and while Polish poetry may not have been read widely in other countries, the political and religious works penetrated far and wide. Modrzewski’s De Republica Emendanda was available in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian. Goślicki’s De Optimo Senatore was published in Venice, Basel and London. Kromer’s Confessio ran into several dozen editions of the original Latin text in various countries, and was translated into Polish, Czech, German, Dutch, French and English. Technical works such as Grzepski’s Geometria became part of the European scientific toolkit, as did those of Mikołaj Kopernik (Copernicus).

      Born at Toruń in 1473, the son of a merchant, Kopernik enrolled at the Jagiellon University in 1491 to study astronomy, and later joined the priesthood, which enabled him to pursue studies at the universities of Bologna, Ferrara and Padua. After returning home, he became administrator of the bishopric of Warmia, but also worked as a lawyer, doctor, architect and even soldier, commanding a fortress in the last clash with the Teutonic Order in 1520. In 1543, the year of his death, he published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, in which he demonstrated that the sun and not the earth was the centre of the planetary system.

      Erasmus was prompted to ‘congratulate the Polish nation…which…can now compete with the foremost and most cultivated in the world’. But this could very well serve as an epitaph, for Polish participation in the cultural life of Europe had reached a peak. A crucial element was language. For centuries the native tongue had been supplemented by Latin, which enjoyed the twin benefit of being a developed instrument of communication and an international medium without which the Poles would have been utterly isolated. As the Scots traveller Fynes Moryson noted in 1593, ‘There is not a ragged boy, nor a smith that shooes your hose, but he can speake Latten readily.’ During the sixteenth century the first of these benefits dwindled as Polish rapidly evolved into a lucid, harmonious language as efficient as Latin for the expression of ideas. The second benefit of Latin also began to wane, as a general drift throughout Europe towards the vernacular tended to restrict its international usefulness. From 1543 the decisions of the Sejm were published in Polish not Latin, and the same went for legal documents. As Polish became the language of state and of literature, Polish thought became increasingly inaccessible to western Europe.

      In a poem he wrote to Erasmus, Bishop Krzycki assured him that the Poles were not only reading all his works, but also passing them on ‘across the Don’. The Russian world, which never had Latin, was heavily dependent on Poland for access to classical and contemporary European literature. It was from Kochanowski’s translations of Tasso, for example, that the first Russian ones were made. The Commonwealth was also the printing house of eastern Europe. The first book, a Bible, to be printed in Belarusian was published in Wilno in 1517. More surprisingly, the first printed work in Romanian was published in Kraków, from which also came quantities of books in Hungarian. By the end of the century the printers of Wilno, Kraków and Lublin were making small fortunes from supplying eastern European markets. The Polish presses also printed the Hebrew religious texts used throughout the European Diaspora.

      The Polish szlachta continued to learn Latin, but German, which had been a crucial link with the outside world until the end of the Middle Ages, gradually dwindled. Partly as a result of the Reformation, Germany’s importance as a source of culture declined for Poland. France and Spain were in the grip of the Counter-Reformation and increasingly absolutist government, which made them unattractive to the Poles. Direct links had been forged with Italy, and Poland itself had acquired most of the amenities for which it had in the past been dependent on others. If the fifteenthcentury Pole had seen himself as living on the edge of a flat earth whose centre was somewhere far away to the west, his counterpart in the late sixteenth saw Poland not as peripheral to Europe, but as central to its own world.

      The East had never had much to offer except for Tatar raids and Muscovite maraudings, but in the course of the sixteenth century a new vista came into view beyond these nuisances. Persian and Ottoman culture began to fascinate Polish society. Apart from owning Turkish artefacts, Stanisław Lubomirski, Palatine of Kraków, also kept three eminent orientalists in his permanent entourage. Tomasz Zamoyski, son of the Chancellor and Hetman, was learning four languages at the age of eight: Latin, Greek, Turkish and Polish. By the time he had completed his early studies, he was fluent in not only Turkish, but also Tatar and Arabic. The Polish Commonwealth was turning into a hybrid of East and West, increasingly exotic but also baffling to western Europeans.

       SEVEN Democracy versus Dynasty

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