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History, the Peasantry, and the Polish Nation in the Thought of Michal Bobrzyński

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Philip Pajakowski
Philip Pajakowski*
Affiliation:
St Anselm College, USA
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Extract

The most important historical works of today are those that take the past of a single nation and state as their subject, for the nation and the state are the highest natural, independently developing organism that humanity has yet achieved.

Like most nineteenth-century historians, Michal Bobrzyński directed his research to the study of his nation's past and especially to the development of political institutions. History, for him, served to enhance a sense of nationhood among his readers by deriving lessons from the experience of the national community and providing a basis for present political activity. As a politically engaged historian, Bobrzyński faced serious issues of the need to reorient Polish national identity and to refashion the historical imagination to meet the needs of his people in the face of the political situation in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 1998 , pp. 249 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

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17. Bobrzyński, , “W imie prawdy dziejowej,” pp. 412–424; on Bobrzyński's historical method, see Grabski, Andrzej Feliks, Orientacje polskiej myśli historycznej: Studia i rożważania (Warsaw, 1972), pp. 325–332.Google Scholar

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19. Bobrzyński, , Dzieje Polski, p. 404.Google Scholar

20. Bobrzyński, , Dzieje Polski, p. 404.Google Scholar

21. Bobrzyński, , Dzieje Polski, pp. 403–405.Google Scholar

22. Bobrzyński, , Dzieje Polski, p. 245.Google Scholar

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25. Bobrzyński, , Dzieje Polski, pp. 400, 380–381.Google Scholar

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30. Bobrzyński, Michał, Jaworski, Władysław Leopold and Milewski, Józef, Z dziejów odrodzenie politycznego Galicyi 1859–1873 (Warsaw, 1905), pp. 482–491.Google Scholar

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32. Bobrzyński, Michal, “W sprawie naszych gymnaziów,” Przeglad Polski, No. 69, 1883, pp. 441–442.Google Scholar

33. Bobrzyński, , “W sprawie naszych gymnaziów,” pp. 436–440; and “W obronie talentu,” Przeglad Polski, No. 71, 1884, pp. 47–48.Google Scholar

34. Bobrzyński, , “W sprawie naszych gymnaziów,” pp. 445–447.Google Scholar

35. Stenographische Protokolle der Sitzungen des Hauses der Abgeordenten des àsterreichischen Reichsrathes, Session 10, 22 March 1889, pp. 4441–4442.Google Scholar

36. Możdżen, , Reformy szkoły średniej, p. 66.Google Scholar

37. Możdżen, , Reformy szkoły średniej, p. 66; Semków, Jerzy, Polityka szkolna władz w pogladach społeczenstwa polskkiego Galicji (szkoły ludowe w okresie wiceprezydentury Michała Bobrzyńskiego) (Wroclaw, 1973), pp. 29–35.Google Scholar

38. Bobrzyński, , “W obronie talentu,” pp. 45–46.Google Scholar

39. Wereszycki, Henryk, Historia polityczna Polski 1864–1918, 2nd edn (Paris, 1979), p. 29.Google Scholar

40. Tarnowski, Stanisław, “Próby rozstroju,” Przeglad Polski, No. 92, 1889, pp. 570–599.Google Scholar

41. Bobrzyński, Michał, “Z chwili ‘rozstroju,'” Przeglad Polski, No. 93, 1889, pp. 346–351; Łazuga, , Bobrzyński, pp. 96–97.Google Scholar

42. Jaskólski, , Historia–Naród–Państwo, pp. 104–106.Google Scholar

43. Bobrzyński, , “Z chwili ‘rozstroju,'” pp. 349–350.Google Scholar

44. Czas, 21 April 1891; 22 April 1891; 5 May 1891; HHStA, IB, 497, 7 March 1891; 625, 27 March 1891; 867, 10 April 1891; 1003, 29 April 1891.Google Scholar

45. Stauter-Halsted, Keely, “Patriotic Celebrations in Austrian Poland: The Kościuszko Centennial and the Formation of Peasant Nationalism,” Austrian History Yearbook, No. 25, 1994, pp. 79–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. Bobrzyński, , “Karta z dziejów ludu wiejskiego w Polsce,” pp. 203, 204, 230–231.Google Scholar

47. For recent discussions of national self-definition among the Poles, see Walicki, Andrzej, Poland between East and West: The Controversies over Self-Definition and Modernization in Partitioned Poland (Cambridge, MA, 1994), especially, on the Stańczyks, pp. 32–35; and Porter, Brian A., “Who Is a Pole and Where Is Poland? Territory and Nation in the Rhetoric of Polish National Democracy before 1905,” Slavic Review, No. 51, 1992, pp. 639–653.Google Scholar

48. Bobrzyński, , Dzieje Polski, p. 406; Serejski, , Naród a Państwo, pp. 205–206.Google Scholar

49. Skurnowicz, , Lelewel, pp. 106–107, 125–127.Google Scholar

50. For Mohl and his influence on Bobrzyński, see Łazuga, , Bobrzyński, p. 46; on Mohl and his view of the Rechtsstaat, see Beyme, Klaus von, ed., Robert von Mohl: Politische Schriften (Cologne, 1966), pp. xviii–xx, 13–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. Raeff, Marc, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, 1983), especially pp. 86–92.Google Scholar

52. Król, , Stańczycy, pp. 33–34; Jaskólski, , Historia–Naród–Państwo, pp. 100–102.Google Scholar

53. For a differing view, see Serejski, , Naród a Państwo, pp. 203–208.Google Scholar