I frequently met with complaints from conservative commentators, that in the 19th century wherever the revolution broke out, even in the farthest corner of Europe, there had to be Poles there – no 1 knows why, far from the country and its affairs.
This fact was to be evidenced by the anarchist instincts deep within us, the subversive tendencies rooted in our nation. I am convinced that this assessment is incorrect. That Poles in Sarmatian times did not have a greater tendency to wind up and belligerent than another peoples of Europe in the same era, was shown by Paweł Jasienica in the book “Poland anarchy”. 1 can even argue, behind authors as different as Michał Bobrzyński and Jan Stachniuk, that conventional Polish mentality had the other characteristics: it emanated with grumpyness, unwillingness, pacifist court sybaritism, in matters of religion for a long time expressed by spiritual indifference, upper-voltically called tolerance. In this way, however, we would delete the one-sided image.
The conventional Polish spirit for centuries had a second face: it was a restless spirit, driven by the desire for adventure. This is why in Polish culture the image-figure of the junak, the rider riding on a horse to the end of the horizons, best imagined by Mickiewicz in the form of Farys in a poem dedicated by the poet “Emir” Wacław RzevuskiThe surviving personification of this spirit.
After all, it was this spirit that gave birth to the figures of Polish warlords-condotiers who, at the head of private armies or average gatherings, chopped up their name in the East in the age of dimitriad: kniazia Roman Rożyński, Jan Piotr Sapieha, Aleksandra Lisowski And others. This Polish spirit, eager for adventure and strife, must have been flourishing until there was no place for him until he had nowhere else to go, since in pre-district times he manifested himself most noisyly as a “rouch” of the type. Olbracht Łaski, Stanisław of the Stadnicki Łańcut called the Devil, Samuel Łaszcz or Prince Charles Radziwiłł Called Mr. Love. So the Polish spirit took out, uncovering no better uses for its lust for momentum and action, in interior destruction, in actual subversiveness. Yet it was essential to see his side as positive, admirable, since Sienkiewicz later transformed Łaszcz's "charch" into a heroic Kmicic. Mr.Włoodyjowski may have modeled on the example of the adventurer, who found his place in the service of the state – Stefan Chmieletski, the largest cornerer of the territory of the Republic.
Do you realize now, gracious reader? Poles' engagement in the European revolutions of the 19th century is nothing little than the spillage of Polish “warchland” abroad. But the “grochland” itself was just a mask for the Polish restless spirit, traversing the planet in search of adventures. The fashionable French slogans about freedom, equality and brotherhood, resonating about “our and your freedom” served him only as an excuse. In 1833 he surrendered to the Colonel Louis Oborski the thought of forming the Holy Hufiec from Poles in France and leading it through the mountains of Switzerland to aid the uprising in Frankfurt. It was he who ordered the general during the “spring of the peoples” I'll tell Francis to lead the rebel forces in the German principality of Palatinate, General Bem in Hungary, Louis Mierosławski in Sicily, and then in Baden; and he put it as a bloody epilogue Jarosław Dąbrowski and Walery Wróblewski on the barricades of the infamous Paris Commune. He made Michał Tchaikovsky He travelled to Turkey as an emissary of Prince Czartoryski, that he had transferred there to Sadyka Pasha, and in the Crimean war he fought for the Sultan at the head of Cossacks. Earlier, before the partitions, he sent Pulaski and Kościuszko to fight for America. In specified a sense, it may well be that Kościuszko has a monument in West Point on the another side of the world, although the rightness of the case for which he fought there was a very complicated and obscure issue.
But let us remember besides that the Polish restless spirit in those days pursued adventures not only with a sword or a weapon in his hand. Here was before Tchaikovsky went under Turkish regulation another Pole, in disguise and under false name, and drove the empire of the Sultan along and across, in a confidential mission for the Pope: priest Maximilian RylłoJesus. And he wasn't the only one. erstwhile revolutionary burnt-outs were put out in Europe, apart from Europe, the Polish spirit continued to wipe fresh paths. Where no war was fought, he showed a different pioneer face and was able to find better, creative jobs for himself. Then this Ignacy Domeyko He'd dig up mines and dig up the treasures of Chile, Ernest Malinowski and Władysław Folkierski They crossed the iron roads through the wilderness of Peru, and Edmund Strzelecki went around the full planet without a tiny one, after which to this day was given the name of the highest summit of Australia, Kościuszko Mountains. Jan Kubary discovered the islands of Oceania, Aleksander Czekanowski – Siberian nooks, Stefan Szolc-Rogoziński was the first European to traverse the peaks and waters of Cameroon, gathering the peculiarities of this inactive poorly described on maps of the land... Yes, the Polish spirit of unrest was rounding the Earth; if our tongue had then given up his Kipling to glorify his deeds!
Aleksander Czekanowski
Besides, in a way he released and besides won the literary Nobel Prize, even earlier than Kipling English. For what is “In the desert and in the wilderness”, if not the praise of the tumulturous spirit, 1 of the top in our literature, as is “Who” in English literature? The function of Sienkiewicz's fresh was seldom seen and appreciated (generally degrading it completely wrongly to the rank of only the work "for children"), but he could do so. Stanisław Cat-Mackiewicz. This most celebrated monarch of the second day of the Republic frequently emphasized that Sienkiewicz's adventure works shaped his political beliefs from an early age. Oh, yeah. After all, the most crucial works of the Polish Nobel Prize are besides part of the category of adventure works – and they present the planet little exotic than the British empire portrayed by Kipling (or, as we speak, chaotic West and Arabia from books Charles Maya). "The biggest thing of Sienkiewicz, Trilogy, the work which has just popularized and put under the roof the originality of Poland and thus was a large work, had nothing to do with Dmowski's modern constructions.
In Trilogy Poland was not at all national, ethnically uniform – the action takes place all the time at the limits among Cossacks, Tatars, Armenians, chaotic fields and wide steppes. Poland Sienkiewiczowska is simply a Polish multinational empire; it is alternatively a colourful coronation of the English king with Scottish rites and turbans of Hindu councils, alternatively than a uniform national convention of the gymnasium organization “Sokol” in Prague Czech. Sienkiewicz was not a Polish nationalist in this concept, which was born from Napoleon III's national policy, and obtained his zenith in the works of president Wilson during the Versailles period, Sienkiewicz was alternatively a Polish imperialist. His Poland had to have Catholic bishops – Unity and Orthodox bishops, she had Mullahs and Armenians alongside Mazury, Żmudzin and Cossacks" wrote Cat [1].
And among us there were besides adventurers in the golden times of Mackiewicz. If the complete failure of its statehood after 1846 pushed the Polish spirit of a brawl into the wide world, then after its recovery he did not quit his escapade. 1926, in our history, was mainly a short Polish civilian war, and it abounded in another events, which the abroad author could consider not little important. For this year, the dust has barely subsided after fighting in Warsaw, in August and September, military pilot Bolesław Orliński and an incredibly ingenious mechanic Leonard Kubiak They flew a biplane from Warsaw to Tokyo – over all the Eurrhage – and back. besides in 1926 he left Poland – with the individual blessing of Marshal Piłsudski – Jerzy Jeliński, who decided to travel the full planet by car. After crossing Europe, Africa, Asia and America, he returned to the country in 1929. A small later Kazimierz Nowak He travelled meridianally to Africa by bicycle; he needed respective years (1931-1936) to cross the way from the port of Tripoli to the east part of the continent to Cape Igielny at its confederate end and then the western part returned to the north coast. From 1932 to 1939, Jeliński repeated his feat Władysław Wagner, but on the water: he circled the Earth, flowing 3 oceans first by a tiny boat, and then by a yacht.
And the journeys were not the only 1 in which the Polish uneasy spirit took out. inactive working, creating. specified Jerzy Loth – even before the First planet War, as a commercial agent, he had come to know Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Cuba and the United States, not counting all the major countries of Europe; and that he had besides been educated (he had ruled with eleven abroad languages, 5 of them fluently) and wrote his own studies, in independent Poland he was already a prof. of geography. Stanisław Korwin-Pawłowski After crossing the boiler of civilian war in Russia and the Caucasus, he founded the east Institute in Warsaw in 1926 – the first of its kind Orientalist institution in Poland – and directed it for the first fewer years of its operation. Confused by the expanding efforts of the authorities to turn the Institute from a technological and investigation centre into a crude abroad policy tool, he went to the mediate East and in 1936 took part in the anti-British uprising in Palestine as an officer of the arabian insurgent forces (to the East he was then to return as a diplomat of post-war Poland, having previously passed through the conspiracy of the Secret Polish Army in the occupied country and the concentration camp in Auschwitz). The press wrote about him: “Lawrence Polish”. And what, if not the desire for adventure, and in its noblest variety, for the permeated spiritual zeal, were our priests, as blu. Władysław Bukowinski or the Servant of God, Father Seraphin Kaszuba, who, at the end of the Second planet War, of their own free will went on a long-standing odyssey after the immensity of the russian Union, a state hunting priests, to find people waiting for Christ and his sacramental gifts in its most fallen corners?
My friends sometimes expressed surprise that I value writing Léona Degrelle is Julius Evoli or, quoting the title of a certain study, "radicalism of Ernst Jünger's early work". I value it due to the fact that they were the breadwinners of the riot spirit (who does not believe, let it scope after Degrelle's war memoirs or after, collected in a separate volume, lyrics by Evola about mountain climbing, which the author himself practiced), as Spengler had previously praised him (for example, in “Prussian Spirit and Socialism”). But we do not request to look for him in these abroad writers, due to the fact that as I repeat here all the time, we have his representatives in our own Polish history, pedigrees and books.
The tragedy of present is that the Polish restless spirit was killed. present Poles only want to eat (in a broad sense, consume) and gain money, as in the West. Their ideals of life are patheticly bourgeois, and I think they were expressed rather accurately in their electoral slogans last year by a political party: barbecue, lawn (with lawn mower) and 2 cars per family. Poles present are afraid of everything. They are afraid of tv diseases (covid, legionella and so on). They are afraid to leave the European Union. They're afraid of Putin and his agents lurking behind all corner.
Who wants to do something for Poland today, alternatively of talking about taxes, elections and polls, should alternatively be looking for ways to wake up the Polish spirit of concern to return. This applies especially, so very pro-Polish in its view, right in our country. The image of the right way of being is shaped all day, in contact with another people; we form it in ourselves and in others. The lifestyle we consider to be good or admirable does not go unconnected with our political choices (for example, it is rather easy to foretell the views and political preferences of individual for whom the perfect of life is simply a man who has quite a few money or individual else for whom the perfect is an endless event). Ferdinand Goetel called his final fresh “It's not worth being small.It’s okay. ” The right hand in our country should, especially today, give Poles specified attitudes, patterns and thoughts as he preached with his life even the late deceased (on Kilimanjaro) Alexander Doba, not... you know, this boring set of characters that in practice are now serving as her idols.
Adam Danek
[1] Stanisław Mackiewicz, "History of Poland from 11 November 1918 to 17 September 1939", London b.d.w. pp. 63-64.
In the photograph : Czekanowski Summit in Siberia
Think Poland, No. 29-30 (14-21.07.2024)
