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The Law of the Looking Glass. Sheila Skaff
Читать онлайн.Название The Law of the Looking Glass
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780821442524
Автор произведения Sheila Skaff
Серия Polish and Polish-American Studies Series
Издательство Ingram
The northern and western parts of the former commonwealth, including the Baltic Sea area called Pomerania and the southwestern area of Silesia, were under control of the German Empire, or Kingdom of Prussia, and comprised a mixture of German-speakers and Polish-speakers. The cities of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg), Gdańsk (Danzig), Królewiec (Königsberg, present-day Kaliningrad), Poznań (Posen), and Wrocław (Breslau) were part of this region. The Prussian lands of the former commonwealth enjoyed more economic stability than the other partitions as well as such social privileges as obligatory elementary school education (from 1825). But its Catholic and Jewish residents experienced severe limitations on their religious and cultural activity. In many areas, the majority of inhabitants were Lutheran and German-speaking.
The Russian partition constituted almost 60 percent of the lands of the former commonwealth but was less densely populated than either Galicia or Prussia. It included parts of present-day Belarus (including Minsk), Lithuania (including Vilnius and Kaunas), and Ukraine (including Zhytomyr). This area witnessed much insurrectional activity during the partitions for several reasons, including friction between the large percentage of Polish-speaking Catholics living there (as high as 80 percent) and the Russian-speaking, Orthodox ruling class as well as several reactionary political moves by both Russia and the insurgents.
Twentieth-century Polish filmmakers often sought their subject matter in the major events of the nineteenth century, seeing in them the essence of Polish nationhood. Literature dealing with failed uprisings, in particular, inspired many a filmmaker. The first revolt, known as the November Uprising of 1830–31, spurred the Great Emigration, in which several thousand military and intellectual leaders fled to Paris and other European cities out of fear of reprisals. Many of these intellectuals turned the failure of the revolution into an internationally supported movement for independence. They drew plans for the reinstitution of the former borders and formed a literary movement known as Polish Romantic nationalism, which flourished in the 1830s and 1840s. The Polish Romantics, particularly their most important poet, Adam Mickiewicz, took very seriously the unifying possibilities of the Polish language. Their attachment to the language was as political as it was emotional and nostalgic. It offered proof that a nation could flourish as a diaspora of citizens of various empires and countries. However, their attachment to language was also universalistic, asking speakers of other languages to understand its messages, even if they could not understand its words, and to align themselves with its cause. Many of them looked to mysticism and religious radicalism to find expression for a homeland that existed without land—a home in words, simultaneously universal and national. In their longing for and preoccupation with the fate of the nation, they wrote passionate, imploring poetry and drama that drew from the traditions of Slavic folklore, kabbalah, Martinism, and other mystical outlets of expression. They glorified patriotism and strove to awaken a Polish national consciousness, which they felt was asleep within the hearts and minds of Polish-speakers. A second failed insurrection in 1846 and revolutionary activity in other parts of Europe during the so-called Spring of Nations in 1848 strengthened the resolve to regain independence. A third failed insurrection, the January Uprising of 1863 in the Congress Kingdom, was a turning point for the nationalist movement. Russian powers renamed the area “Vistula Land” and removed its autonomy, triggering the transformation of its socioeconomic structure. Insurgents were executed or deported to Siberia, the Polish nobility lost its status, and local languages were made unofficial. The Polish nationalist movement reacted by intensifying its campaign in the German Empire. In Galicia, where cultural autonomy accompanied a lack of economic control, some people expressed a need for agricultural modernization and economic overhaul.
At this time, there emerged a new literary movement, Positivism, which supported “organic work,” scientific progress, and economic reform. Positivist writers such as Eliza Orzeszkowa and Bolesław Prus examined daily life in the empires, the relationship between human beings and nature, and Polish history in their novels. The Positivists were avid translators, acquainting readers in the partitions with Western traditions and encouraging the influx of new ideas and technology. They supported industrialization, openness to other countries, and free labor, which resulted in the migration of the emancipated peasants and minorities to large cities. In 1887, visionaries and intellectuals took notice of yet another example of Positivist ingenuity: the publication of a guide to the artificial language Esperanto, written by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, of Białystok (Bielastok). In later years, many Positivists took an active interest in cinema and saw their works adapted for the screen, and film critics were counted among the most avid proponents of Esperanto.9 At the same time, Yiddish emerged from the neighborhoods and the shtetls as a rich language, full of original metaphors and colorful proverbs expressive of the folkloric traditions of Jews in the region. It, too, became a source of inspiration for filmmakers.
It was in the 1890s, toward the end of the Positivist movement, that local activists began to form political organizations. The multiplicity of these organizations and of the schools of thought that separated them demonstrates the ideological chaos that accompanied the introduction of cinema. The Polish Socialist Party (PPS) came into being in 1892 to promote the reestablishment of the Polish state and the implementation of a socialist program. Józef Piłsudski soon became its leader. A year later, Rosa Luxemburg and other doctrinaire Marxists formed the Social Democratic Party (SDKP). Although the SDKP sought to bring socialism to the region, it did not seek Polish independence. A modern Polish nationalist party, the National Democratic Party, found a leader in Roman Dmowski, whose nationalist ideology was decidedly xenophobic, anti-Jewish, and anti-German. Dmowski demanded the full assimilation of non-Polish minorities to his view of Polish tradition, which did not include the custom of religious and linguistic tolerance known in the former Res Publica.
The actual role of language in daily life varied according to time and place, ranging from the liberal policies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the strict prohibitions on use of language in education and government that characterized the Congress Kingdom of Poland. In the hearts and imaginations of Polish speakers, Polish flourished. To speak Polish—for Jews and Lutherans, as well as for Catholics—was to be Polish, and to be Polish was, with little room for exception, to long for a homeland. One of the main arenas for the cultivation of this desire for national sovereignty was Polish-language theater production. In spite of its limitations with regard to language, early traveling cinema fulfilled at least one function that theater could not. As entrepreneurs traveled with their exhibits, moving constantly among the small towns in the empires, they were potential carriers of the kinds of information—national, educational, social, and cultural agendas—that supporters of Polish autonomy wanted to transmit.
The first two decades of cinema were also the last decades of the partition period, a chaotic time in those regions. Discrepancies among the empires in the levels of modernization, education, and wealth, as well as in the general feeling of community made the thought of reunifying Poland difficult. Piłsudski and the PPS supported the Russian Revolution of 1905 by organizing strikes and boycotts in the Russian partition. Reaction to the revolution varied among the many political groups vying for popular support, but this particular activity of the PPS drew attention to Poles’ possible willingness to engage in armed conflict to bring about independence. In this atmosphere of chaos, fear, determination, and pride, a new literary-cultural movement, Młoda Polska (Young Poland), was born. Young Poland was as disordered as the period in which it arose; decadent writers and artists stressed the ideals of aestheticism, pure form, and art as an absolute. Art, they felt, should be divorced from politics and created only for its own sake. Reconciling their approach to art with the political situation of the time, however, they also brought the Romantic nationalist poets back into vogue and supported the use of the Polish language.
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