BETWEEN EAST AND WEST
Writings from Kultura
Edited by Robert Kostrzewa
New York: Hill and Wang, 1990.
273 pp., $30.00
It is a beautiful thing to see human beings struggling to be honest. It is a tribute to the writers included in this anthology that nearly every page reflects such struggle. In a certain sense, the subject discussed is irrelevant - what matters most here is the luminous example of the conscious human intelligence striving to tell the truth.
But, of course, the subject is not in the least irrelevant because it is Poland, a complex and tragic land. Americans with stunted historical memories think of Poland as a victim nation, a dog kicked either by Germany or Russia. Poles, for better or worse, do not suffer from under developed memory; on the contrary, memory is very long. And one thing the Poles clearly remember is that well into the seventeenth century, they were not only a militarily powerful nation but also, by the standards of those times, a just and free country.
Long memory
The Polish king was elected by the nobility, who comprised 10 percent of the population, and therefore the country was at least 10 percent more democratic than most of its neighbors. Not only did the nobles elect the king, any one of them could by a single veto bring an entire session of the nobles' Parliament to a sudden close. And thus began the tragedy of Poland, which arose from the nobles valuing their individual liberty too highly, though they would have replied that individual liberty is all that truly matters and can not be valued too highly. And there were some, of course, who were of less than immaculate honor whose vote could be bought for the coin of the realm.
The system had a built-in tendency to centrifugal anarchy, but as long as the center held, Poland was strong. It was the master of vast territory that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, and included what is today Lithuania, Belorussia, and the Ukraine. Russia, just back on its feet after two and half centuries of Mongol domination (1240-1490), still posed no danger. The Poles defeated the Russians regularly, once even capturing Moscow.
Poland saw itself as the easternmost rampart of the Roman Catholic West, by definition a heroic position. The nation partook of the great movements of Western civilization - the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment-as Russia did not. It not only partook of the Renaissance by sending its young poets and scholars to Italy to study; Poland was also a place where the Renaissance occurred. During the Reformation, Poland was known as a "paradise for heretics," and at one point the country was even in the verge of becoming Protestant. The Jews of Poland were subjected to the same sort of persecution they suffered in every European country, England included. Still, granting the Jews a fraction of the intelligence for which they are famed and envied, one must assume that such a huge community had not chosen to dwell so long in Poland because it was the very worst place on earth. Poland was in fact a mini empire, a multiethnic state that contained even some Muslim
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