4 - Literature as Compensation: Comprador Intelligentsia vis-à-vis the Hegemonic Discourse—Preliminary Theoretical Remarks

Summary

The poverty of the people, national oppression, and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Polish mentality is encircled, as if by a prison wall, by an enclosure that is invisible but also impregnable to the external light of knowledge.

—Ignacy Radliński, Nasza umysłowość (Our mentality)

Until recently, the issue of attitudes adopted by nineteenth-century Polish elites toward the Russian Empire and its representative institutions was approached by Polish historiography from basically one angle. This “heroic” mode of describing the Polish experience of partitions and foreign domination accentuated the tradition of the struggle for independence. The approach had the effect of downplaying other, nonheroic attitudes and acts of Polish collaboration with the enemy, which were viewed as occasional flaws on the otherwise nearly perfect image of noble and brave resistance. In other words, the narrative established by historiographical accounts for most of the twentieth century presented the uncompromising struggle against czarist despotism as the dominant position in Poland's partitioned society while marginalizing any evidence to the contrary. The literary and cultural output of Polish writers and artists of the nineteenth century can be read as derivative of this condition since it typically aligns the choices and decisions of the conquered population with Poland's national interests: the fight, whether active or passive, against the three hegemons, with czarist Russia viewed as the most ferocious and destructive. From such a perspective, both ambiguous and openly contrary (for instance, collaborative or treasonous) positions were generally seen as incidental and of secondary importance to Polish scholarship. They were not, in any case, allowed to disturb the cohesive picture of the heroic whole.

The liberation of the Polish historiographic discourse from its earlier ideological restrictions, which came at the end of the 1980s, inevitably also impacted the situation outlined above. The question of treason, collaboration, renunciation, and national apostasy began to gain ground, aided by changes in historical research methodologies as well as an intellectual climate conducive to breaking earlier social and academic taboos—the contribution of postmodernist humanities in Poland. Shifting from the margins toward the center of study, these issues at times even acquired—whether rightly so is a matter of discussion—the status of the primary problem in the history of Polish society.