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Desiring the Other: The Ambivalent Polish Self in Novel and Film

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Elżbieta Ostrowska
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In this article, Elżbieta Ostrowska employs categories of postcolonialism to examine two novels by Henryk Sienkiewicz,With Fire and Sword and Fire in the Steppe, and their filmic adaptations by Jerzy Hoffman. Her aim is to reconstruct their ideological discourse regarding Polish national identity and its positioning within Europe. Located between east and west, Poland was both a colonizing power (of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belorussia) and a colonized country (by Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary). These two novels, written during the time of partitions, offer a nostalgic vision of the country’s past power and its colonizing aspirations. Ostrowska argues that various textual efforts aimed at solidifying the notion of national identity and its positioning within a geopolitical order of Europe are disrupted by structures of female desire implicitly present in both the novels and films. These structures puncture the solid fabric of the national historical epic and undermine the hegemonic notion of Polish masculinity.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 70 , Issue 3 , Fall 2011 , pp. 503 - 523
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2011

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References

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3 This often quoted phrase comes from the final authorial comment made by Henryk Sienkiewicz in Pan Wolodyjowski. In Jeremiah Curtin’s translation of the novel from 1897 it reads: “Here ends this series of books, written in the course of a number of years and with no little toil, for the strengthening of hearts.” Henryk Sienkiewicz, Pan Michael, trans. Jeremiah Curtin (New York, 1968), 527.

4 Because recent studies have dealt with the problem of film adaptation (for example, Robert Stam, “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” in Stam, Robert and Raengo, Alessandra, eds., Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation [Maiden, Mass., 2005], 1–52)Google Scholar, I will not examine the theoretical issues involving the relationship between the novels and the films. Instead, I will treat the novels and the films as complementary texts. Given the enormous success of Hoffman’s films and their popularity, I would argue that within contemporary reception, drawing a line to separate the novels from the films is hardly possible and certainly invidious. In addition, Hoffman offers, in the main, a canonical model of the novels, therefore a detailed comparative analysis would seem superfluous. Nevertheless, any significant discrepancy between the novels and the films will be noted.

5 The novel concerns the military rebellion of the Ukrainian Cossacks and the peasants who, under the leadership of Hetman Khmelnytsky (Chmielnicki), fought against the Poles and the polonized Ukrainian gentry; for a detailed analysis of the historical context, see Ewa Hauser, “Reconstruction of National Identity: Poles and Ukrainians among Others in Jerzy Hoffman’s film With Fire and Sword,” Polish Review 45, no. 3 (2000): 305–17.

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7 Azja is the Polish word for Asia. Thus, the semantics of his name provides a direct way to “orientalize” him. In Sienkiewicz’s novel other characters often address Azja as a stereotypical eastern man; for example, Mr. Zagloba says, “he [Azja] possessed that calculating shrewdness common to Eastern people.” Henryk Sienkiewicz, Fire in the Steppe, trans. W. S. Kuniczak (Ambler, Penn., 1992), 385.

8 Marszalek, Rafal, “Film fabularny,” in Marszalek, Rafal, ed., Historia filmu polskiego (Warsaw, 1994)Google Scholar, 6:70. Tadeusz Lubelski makes a similar claim in his recent book on die history of Polish cinema: “Hoffman’s film… was supposed to meet a current political demand for an appreciation of Polishness.” , Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego: Twórcy, filmy, konteksty (Chorzów, 2009), 280.Google Scholar

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11 In fact, in With Fire and Sword, Otherness is also represented through the female figure of Horpyna. Ewa Kosowska argues that she represents an independent model of femininity associated with witchcraft. See Ewa Kosowska, Negocjaqe i kompromisy: Antropologia polskości Henryka Sienkiewicza (Katowice, 2002). Ewa Hauser subsequently examines the character in Hoffman’s film, focusing on her sexuality, more precisely on hints of Horpyna’s lesbianism, absent in the literary source. She argues, “Her lesbianism constitutes an ultimate crossing over to a demonic sexuality and thus stresses the distance between civilized Western Polish ways and Eastern wildness and barbarity.” Hauser, “Reconstruction of National Identity,” 315. In introducing this theme, Hauser further develops the motif of an excess of libidinal energy provided by the east. To make it even more visible, she identifies it as the opposite of the dominant heterosexual model. Importantly, Horpyna’s lesbian desire is directed at Skrzetuski’s love, Helena. Thus, the latter functions as a double object of desire for both the eastern man and the eastern woman. Consequently, it can be argued that Horpyna's character destabilizes the gendered aspect of the vernacular variant of Polish orientalism.

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13 During Chmielnicki’s uprising against the Polish gentry, the Cossacks found allies in the Tatars, hence the constant association of the two groups in Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword. In the novel, the Cossacks are often addressed as brothers of the Poles who had betrayed them as well as Christendom.

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18 Davies, Heart of Europe. Many critics and writers use the phrase “East of the West and West of the East” when discussing Poland’s ambiguous geopolitical positioning. See, for example, Janion, Niesamowita Slowianszczyzna, 11.

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22 Ibid. See also Anna Klobucka, “Desert and Wilderness Revisited: Sienkiewicz’s Africa in the Polish National Imagination,” Slavic and East European Journal 45, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 245.

23 This mythologized image of France and Prussia often contradicts the historical reality. For example, after the disastrous end of the November Uprising, Polish refugees in France were treated with occasional hostility.

24 Kalinowska, Izabela, Between East and West: Polish and Russian Nineteenth-Century Travel to the Orient (Rochester, 2004)Google Scholar, 1. In fact, an interest in the Orient appeared in Poland as early as the seventeenth century. Magdalena Ujma briefly examines this issue in her article concerning the intersecting influences of the west and the east in Sienkiewicz’s The Deluge and Fire in the Steppe. See Magdalena Ujma, “Miedzy Wschodem a Zachodem Europy: NowoΖytne obyczaje rodzime i cudzoziemskie w świede Potopu i Pana Wolodyjowskiego,” in Krzysztof Stepnik and Tadeusz Bujnicki, eds., Henryk Sienkieuricz w kulturze polskiej (Lublin, 2007), 204.

25 Sienkiewicz was criticized by his contemporaries for this lack of familiarity with Ukraine, the main place of action in With Fire and Sword. In 1884, Zygmunt Kaczkowski in an article published in a Polish magazine wrote, “the image of Ukraine can satisfy those who have never seen it but not those who know it or diose who know what to expect from a historical novel.” Zygmunt Kaczkowski, "Rozprawa z Ogniem i mieaem," in Jodelka-Burzecki, Tomasz, ed., Trylogia Henryka Sienkiewicza: Studia, szkice, polemiki (Warsaw, 1962), 109.Google Scholar

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27 Sienkiewicz, Henryk, With Fire and Sword, trans. Kuniczak, W. S. (New York, 1991), 3–4.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., 39.

29 The English version of the novel in its “modern translation” by W. S.Kuniczak omits this description throughout the text.

30 Sienkiewicz, , With Fire and Sword, 34 Google Scholar. Recently, Andrzej Mencwel has become the first Polish literary scholar to offer an extensive analysis of a negative connotation of the term czerri. Interestingly, Mencwel’s argument that this linguistic choice objectifies the inhabitants of Ukraine has been strongly rejected by many of his colleagues who consequently deny seeing a colonialist or suprematist message in With Fire and Szuord. For the complete discussion of the issue, see Mencwel, “Antropologia Sienkiewiczowska” and Jerzy Axer et al., “Dyskusja,” both in Tadeusz Bujnicki and Jerzy Axer, eds., Po co Sienkiewicz? Sienkiewicz a tozsamos’c narodowa: Zkirn, iprzeciw komu? (Warsaw, 2007), 271’86.

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32 Jolanta Sztachelska notices this aspect of Sienkiewicz’s narration, see Axer et al., “Dyskusja,” 278.

33 Kuniczak’s translation of the novel omits this sentence as well. Sienkiewicz, Henryk, Ogniem i mieczem (Warsaw, 1968), 33.Google Scholar

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35 Sienkiewicz, , Ogniem i mieczem, 50, 45.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., 55.

37 Sienkiewicz, Fire in the Steppe, 333, 352, 413

38 In her pioneering analysis of Polish heritage cinema, Ewa Mazierska also comments on casting issues in relation to Hoffman’s With Fire and Sword: “casting the dashing Russian Alexander Domogorov in the role of Bohun against the less charismatic Polish actor, Michal Żebrowski, increases the viewer’s sympathy for Bohun and, by extension, for the Cossack’s plight.“ Mazierska, Polish Postcommunist Cinema, 76. Although I generally agree with Mazierska’s argument, I would also argue that because Domogorov was unknown to the Polish audience, he had an advantage in imbuing the character of Bohun with a certain mysteriousness, a typical feature of the Other/eastern man.

39 Hall, Stuart, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” in Hall, Stuart, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London, 1997), 229.Google Scholar Emphasis in the original.

40 Said, Orientalism, 3.

41 Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London, 1994), 22, 20.Google Scholar

42 Brian Massumi equates affect with intensity and describes it as resisting any precise qualification. In explaining the difference between emotion and affect, he writes, ”an emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience Uiat is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. It is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion. If some have die impression that affect has waned, it is because affect is unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognizable and is thus resistant to critique.” Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, 2002), 28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 In a recently published collection of essays on Sienkiewicz,s work, Jadwiga Zacharska examines the thematic motif of forgiveness. She writes, “An ability to forgive in Sienkiewicz’s works signifies culture and it distinguishes the well-developed civilizations that… overcome primal instincts and impulses. The writer demonstrates that, for example, the primitive communities of Black Africans, Arabs from In the Desert and Wilderness, Ukrainian peasantry from With Fire and Sword… and the Poles in the era of Christendom do not develop this.”Jadwiga Zacharska, “Sztuka przebaczania wedhig Sienkiewicza,” in Stepnik and Bujnicki, eds., Henryk Sienkiewia w kulturze polskiej, 44. Yet, the author does not comment on the ideological aspect of this thematic motif, nor does she mention the problem of a cultural supremacy conveyed by it.

44 Quoted in Mazierska, Polish Postcommunist Cinema, 75.

45 Skrzetuski’s beloved, Helena Kurcewiczòwna, comes from a polonized Russian family. In order to prove her Polishness, she displays throughout the novel an exceptionally negative attitude toward Bohun, rejecting all of his advances. All the more ambiguous and significant, therefore, is her longing gaze toward him at the end of the film.

46 Maxwell, Alexander, “National Endogamy and Double Standards: Sexuality and Nationalism in East-Central Europe during the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 Sienkiewicz, Fire in the Steppe, 298.

48 Ibid., 467.

49 Ibid.

50 Mazierska, Polish Postcommunist Cinema, 77.

51 Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Thornham, Sue, ed., Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (New York, 1999), 68.Google Scholar

52 The model of masculine heterosexual spectatorship is destabilized through the images of the homosexual behavior of Tatars in Hoffman’s With Fire and Sword (again, these images are absent in Sienkiewicz’s novel). Ewa Hauser interprets this destablization as another “sign of transgression against Western norms of respectability.” In her general conclusion she argues that, "Hoffman replaces the Ukrainians… who constituted the ‘other’ helping to define Polishness for Sienkiewicz a century ago, by diose who are less threatening to the present Polish reason of state: the far-away oriental Tatars… and demonic homosexuals, represented by a transvestite and a witch.” Hauser, ‘Reconstruction of National Idendty,’ 317. In agreeing with this opinion, I would maintain that it is only relevant to die explicit meanings of the film. Furthermore, it seems diat Hauser identifies Otherness solely in negative terms, ignoring its dialectical and often contradictory aspects that are the focus of this analysis.

53 Shohat, “Gender and Culture of Empire,” 32.

54 Neale, Steve, “Prologue: Masculinity as Spectacle. Reflection on Men and Mainstream Cinema,” in Cohan, Steven and Hark, Ina Rae, eds., Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (London, 1993), 14.Google Scholar

55 The spectacular character of the scene of Azja’s impalement is not exceptional in cinema. In her article on masculinity in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, Ina Rae Hark argues that films focusing on a conflict between men often make a spectacle of the protagonist’s enemy. She also notes that, “most frequendy this spectacle is sado-masochistic, enacted through beating or torture, during which the male body, marked by the punishment, is eroticized through stripping or binding.’ Ina Rae Hark, “Animals or Romans: Looking at Masculinity in Spartacus,” in Cohan and Hark, eds., Screening the Male, 152.

56 Shohat, “Gender and Culture of Empire,” 39.

57 Davies, Heart of Europe, 301.

58 See Anderson, Benedict, Imagined, Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 2006).Google Scholar

59 Walicki, Andrzej, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland(Oxford, 1982), 67.Google Scholar

60 Ibid., 69.

61 Ibid., 72.

62 Bernstein, Matthew, “Introduction,” in Bernstein and Studlar, eds., Visions of the East, 11.Google ScholarPubMed

63 Mazierska, , Polish Postcommunist Cinema, 89 Google Scholar. Although formulated in a different manner, Hauser’s account of the film accords with Mazierska’s opinion.