Between Fantasy & Realism: Utopia in the Polish Enlightenment

czym_jest_oswiecenie_37.jpg, default, The project of the Ujazdów Church (front elevation) near Warsaw by Vincenzo Brenna (1741-1820), 1781, drawing: brush, ink, watercolours, photo: from t

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Polish Enlightenment artists had a different approach to the French and English writers famed for their utopian worlds. Where did the Poles send their protagonists to, and what made them different?

Many philosophers have wanted to find an optimal way of achieving the ideal set-up for socio-political life. The mythical Atlantis and Fortunate Isles are the products of dreams about a perfect world with kind-hearted and decent people living in harmony. Among the most iconic projects with the literary motif of an ideal community are Utopia by Thomas More (1516), The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon and The City of The Sun by Giovanni Campanella (1623). The work of Thomas More is the most significant one since it includes the term ‘utopia’ itself, which means ‘no place’ in Greek and refers to a non-existent idyllic place which doesn’t reflect reality.

From the land of England to Poland

The original title of More's Latin publication was A Little, True Book, Not Less Beneficial than Enjoyable, about How Things should be in a State and about the New Island Utopia. The idea was to promote a certain society model that was linked to the author's ambition of repairing the social life of all of Europe. He succeeded, though only in the creation of utopia – a new didactic literary style describing the lives of idyllic societies. What is utopia all about according to the author?

Text

Thus you see that there are no idle persons among them, nor pretences of excusing any from labour. There are no taverns, no alehouses, nor stews among them, nor any other occasions of corrupting each other, of getting into corners, or forming themselves into parties; all men live in full view, so that all are obliged both to perform their ordinary task and to employ themselves well in their spare hours; and it is certain that a people thus ordered must live in great abundance of all things, and these being equally distributed among them, no man can want or be obliged to beg.

According to Thomas More, a perfect society was established on values such as work, equality, public scrutiny and well-being. Reflecting upon the Polish reception of the work and the way utopias became part of Polish cultural history, it is worth examining the groundwork for the prototypical utopia.

It turns out that the original work published in 1516 had to wait 431 years for its first translation into Polish. It was translated by the classical philologist and translator Kazimierz Abgarowicz. Why wasn’t it popular enough to be translated earlier? The answer to that question lies within the Polish utopian literature from the Enlightenment. What literary experiments with Utopia were delighting Polish readers during this period?

The creators of utopias usually set their stories in the past (namely, the myth of the Golden Age), or in the future (see Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium, 2013). In his publication, Encounters with Utopia, the philosopher Jerzy Szacki wrote that both types of utopias are escapist. To reach the authenticity of experience, the authors made their protagonist set off on a literary journey and travel far from or even beyond the familiar European world. And so it was in the literary utopias of the 18th century.

A little-known example of a utopia set in the past is the short story The Year 2440 by Louis-Sebastien Mercier, published in 1771. By contrast, a very well-known mythical utopia is to be found on Eldorado Island. In the 15th century, ‘el dorado’ (from Spanish: el hombre dorado, or ‘the golden human’) meant a legendary land full of gold situated in South America. Two centuries later, the philosopher Voltaire took the characters from his short story to the utopian Eldorado. He wrote it to mock the European vision of happiness and the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The title of the story was Candide, or Optimism, and was published in France in 1759. Did Polish authors take a lesson from the French writer and use legends as an inspiration for their utopian worlds? Where did their protagonists travel to?

Not Huxley’s island

Krasicki ignacy portret .jpg — Ignacy Krasicki, rep. Marek Skorupski / Forum

Let’s take a look at two especially important novels. The first one is a Polish novel The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom by Ignacy Krasicki, published in Warsaw in 1776. The most iconic writer of the Polish Enlightenment, Krasicki decided to take his protagonist to Nipu Island for his literary utopia. The second example, Wojciech Zdarzyński, Życie i Przypadki swoje Opisujący (Wojciech Zdarzyński, Describing his Life & Adventures) by Michał Dimitrij Krajewski, is interesting for a different reason. The book was published in Warsaw in 1785 and contains the first description of a moon expedition in Polish literature. The main character meets the people of Sielan who are members of a utopian society.

In Krasicki's novel, we have to make do with a narrative cliché: the protagonist comes from the village of Szumin, and after a few adventures in the capital city, he goes to the heart of the European Enlightenment, Paris. Yet, being in a state of perpetual melancholy, he decides to go on a sea adventure to an unknown land. He goes to Batavia, which is today's Jakarta, a city on the island of Java. Today Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia, and in the times of Krasicki, it was the capital of the Dutch East Indies. Behind the Cape of Good Hope, at the tip of Africa, the ship sinks because of the storm, and protaganist Gabriel Wisdom is left to stay on an island all alone, much like Robinson Crusoe from Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel of the same name or Tom Hanks in Cast Away (2000). This main character has more luck than most, since the island is in fact inhabited. The first meeting of this Polish man with the islanders goes as follows:

Text

I approached the place eagerly and saw a fairly large crowd of people watching some sort of pageant. From afar they soon noticed my dress, which apparently was something not seen in those parts. They all moved toward me, and in the twinkling of an eye I was surrounded by people who examined me curiously. Our mutual wonder lasted for several minutes. Then a dignified old man approached me; when he gave me his hand as a sign of welcome, I fell to his feet and shed bitter tears. He raised me up eagerly and began to speak gently, as I was able to surmise from his look and gestures, for the tongue in which he spoke was totally foreign to me.

Author

Translation by Thomas H. Hoisington, 1992

Thumbnail — The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom by Ignacy Krasicki, photo: Wikimedia Commons

The behaviour of Gabriel Wisdom – the eccentric act of falling at his feet and shedding bitter tears – looks just like an Old Polish custom. In 1953, this tradition was presented again in Trans-Atlantic by Witold Gombrowicz and treated with his tragicomic grotesque style. But let's get back to Nipu: why is it specifically a utopian island?

In Nipuan society, the most important task is to protect nature and natural rights. As a result, all people are equal, which also means accepting the natural freedom of every human being. No human being is allowed to rule another. This rule had far-reaching social consequences: every kind of power and violence was condemned, meaning nobody could use metal nor eat meat (yes, Nipuan society is vegetarian!). Unlike in literary utopias from Western Europe, there is no such thing as a centralised political power. Also, Krasicki did not write about the private property issue – he did not include the commonwealth of goods of every islander (let alone the community of wives and children usually present in Western texts). The Nipuan social contract was based on the idea that people should follow the intergenerational wisdom of the elderly. Krasicki created a utopian society based on the cult of wisdom and virtue. Well, what else could we expect from the author of moralistic fables? A surprising fact is that the Nipuan wisemen had doubts about reason and progression, even though these are both commonly known as a source of the Enlightenment! Is it possible then that Krasicki did not agree with the key ideas of the Age of Reason?

It’s a hard thing to accept. To achieve a better understanding of the author's intention, it’s important to remember that the story of Mr. Wisdom is satirical. Therefore, the presented image of Nipuan society is a way of questioning certain values. In the most extreme scenario, one could suggest the text mocks these values. Yet, Krasicki’s wise and mild writing style did not intend to create a lampoon. It was more about creating a wary distance towards all-powerful rationalism and undoubtedly good progress. The main character symbolises Polish reality. In this way, he confronts the idealised Nipu society and leaves the readers with questions about the need to serve people, the right use of rationalism and progress, and the extent to which they unite and divide people.

The first Polish man on the moon

Reason and technical development were usually inconsiderately declared superior values. Therefore, utopian artists reminded audiences that one needs to remember about mindfulness in that process. A reminder of this can be found in the utopian creation of Michał D. Krajewski (1746-1817). Eleven years younger than Krasicki, the author of Wojciech Zdarzyński, Describing his Life & Adventures made his protagonist travel by hot-air balloon to the utopian land of Sielan, situated on the moon. The literary motif of a moon expedition is also present in Teodor Tripplin’s Podróż Lunatyka po Miesiącu (A Sleepwalker's Journey around the Moon). The interest in air exploration is unsurprising since the first hot-air balloon flights took place in France in 1783 and in Poland one year later.

Krajewski's idea about a society from the moon is conceptually similar to Krasicki's idea. Sielan is an agrarian society for whom the ground and work are the two most crucial values of life. For them, virtue is more important than knowledge. It seems that Krajewski was inspired by the socio-philosophical element of Krasicki's novel. One may notice a certain literary recreation in the adventures of Wojciech Zdarzyński based on the ones of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom.

What brings one’s attention to this story are the fragments that create reality, for instance when the protagonist looks at the Earth and says:

Text

It's been three hours (if I’ve measured correctly) since the sun set, and the full moon around the Earth has made the night so bright that one could start reading.

Author

Trans. SS

Whereas, when Zdarzyński gets to the second city on the moon, the capital city of Wabadu, it turns out that the novel is a didactic satire built on a contrast:

Text

We, the people of Earth are in love with fortune. Worshiping gold, we do not know anything about saving money nor working nor any other of the values of the Sielans.

Author

Trans. SS

The author’s intention was clearly to present that Sielans know what the happiness of an individual and of society is and that they know how they can achieve it.

Krajewski's utopia doesn’t consist of any detailed political project. His story simply makes one enjoy the literary fantasy of the Enlightenment. It does not, however, include the main problem discussed in socio-political utopias, namely the idea of ownership in an equal society. This issue was neither brought up by Krasicki nor by Krajewski. The former writer did not make any realistic conclusions concerning the topic, while the latter avoided it completely. But this isn’t because of the problem itself nor due to insufficient writing skills. It is actually reflects is that the Polish way of thinking did not fit into the framework of the European model of an ideal society. Why was that so?

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was an oligarchy and a republic of nobles. The Polish noble reader would surely enjoy reading a fantasy novel, but would hardly accept a vision of general equality and freedom. Among the four values included in Thomas More’s treatise – work, equality, public scrutiny and prosperity – only the last one was of interest to the Polish reader. It could not be otherwise. The core of Sarmatian culture was rooted in Old Polish ideals, which were against democratic and uniform autocratic systems. That is why these two literary experiments –Nipu island and the land of Sielan –both stopped midway, somewhere between fantasy and realism.

Life versus utopia

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‘Country Idyll’ by Henryk Siemiradzki, late 1860s, oil on canvas, photo: Borys Voznytsky Lviv National Art Gallery, from the exhibition: ‘Searching for Arcadia’ in the National Museum in Kraków

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There are many interchangeable elements in the roots of literary experiments with utopia, such as proving that people can be happy or promoting certain political resolutions. In an optimistic scenario, it was supposed to be a country that functions according to a social agreement providing happiness for every individual. The citizens were supposed to feel safe thanks to voluntarily and obediently respecting the law. As a result, there has to be some ethical dimension in the philosophy of these fictional countries, a system which would encourage people to make independent and uncoerced choices about what is best for the common interest. Utopias, with their idealised characters, did not include any negative consequences in their functioning. Such a system could provoke the vanquishing of individualism and privacy, the lack of a free-market economy, the existence of an absolute power protecting the permanence of law, and the lack of a socio-political opposition. Over the next couple of centuries, this matter, together with the concept of Big Brother, was taken up by anti-utopian art. These later artists presented individuals as completely dependent on the ruling system (for instance, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) and their societies as dystopian, meaning the lack of any possibility of improving their socio-political situation (Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale).

Realism and fantasy meet in the world of utopia and are constantly conducting a dialogue with our own reality. They function as a fun-house mirror. You may ask: how will it all end for Mr. Nicholas Wisdom and Wojciech Zdarzyński? The former returns to Europe and tries to live in Spain according to the Nipuan way of live, which leads to his imprisonment in a mental institution. Despite this, he manages to come back to Poland where he decides to start a virtuous, noble life as a landowner. The latter protagonist also decides to settle down and start a calm landowner life. In fact, both stories are similar to Candide’s conclusion from the end of his travels, when he says: ‘You must cultivate your own garden.’ It seems the Enlightenment authors may have experimented with utopias, but their licencia poetica allowed them to create happy fictional resolutions that would please their readers’ expectations. Ultimately, their protagonists end up in peaceful happy places, full of mundane joys.

Originally written in Polish, Nov 2020; translated by SS, Apr 2021

The Adam Mickiewicz Institute is joining the 230th anniversary celebrations of the Constitution of May 3rd by organizing an exhibition at the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania in Vilnius. It will include unique exhibits, such as the manuscript of the Government Act of 1791 and the Jan Matejko painting The Constitution of May 3rd from 1871. In Vilnius, portraits of prominent participants of the Four Years' Sejm and numerous works of art related to the Stanisław era will also be shown. The opening of the exhibition is planned for October 20th this year in connection with the anniversary of the Mutual Assertion of Both Nations on that day – the detailed regulations implementing the Constitution of May 3rd, adopted by the Four-Year Sejm, concerning the relationship between the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The exhibition, prepared in co-operation with the Royal Castle in Warsaw, can be admired in Vilnius until 16th January 2022.

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The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom