Local Knowledge: At the Source of the Modern Stereotype (& Truth) About Russia

german_16th_century_caricature_of_the_oprichnina_executions.jpg, default, Local Knowledge: At the Source of the Modern Stereotype (& Truth) About Russia, 16th-century German caricature of the oprichnina executions under Ivan the Terrible. Photo: public domain, center, #000000

#language & literature

Around 500 years ago some Polish authors, writing from the midst of early modern European history, started noticing that there was something odd and deeply concerning about their Eastern aggressive neighbour. Their observations became one of the early sources of stereotypes and knowledge about Russia in its subsequent iterations - a knowledge still relevant today.

Centuries before Astolphe de Custine and other Russia experts in the West, early modern Polish authors formulated some of the most intriguing and salient observations with regard to the Russian state, its rule, character, society, and ultimate goals. These observations would then become one of the sources of Western stereotypes and knowledge about Russia, shaping policies and impacting more professional scholarship of the future.

This knowledge may have enabled these authors to understand Russia better, still it did not prevent their state from eventually falling prey to the powerful aggressor.

We take a look at the observations and insights of early modern Polish authors, like Kochanowski, Pasek, and Potocki, as Poland came for the first time into direct contact with Muscovy at the time of its most ambitious and ruthless expansion, which however was also a time of crisis.

Turks, Vallachians, & Muscovy…

A map from Siegmund Herberstein's book Rerum moscoviticarum commentarii, 1571

The earliest glimpses of Polish writers’ first-hand knowledge of Russia date back from the second half of the 16th century. This is when, following the Union of Lublin of 1569 which established a powerful united Commonwealth of Poland and the Lithuanian Duchy, Poland came for the first time into direct contact with the Grand Duchy of Moscow, establishing political ties and diplomatic relations.

The shared border, contested territories, and the wars which promptly followed (most importantly the Livonian Campaigns of Zygmunt II August and Stefan Batory for the domination in the Baltic Sea) became an opportunity for gleaning first-hand information about the fellow Slavic state of Moscow, which until then had been rather exotic and distant.

The contact with the state ruled at the time by the infamous Ivan IV the Terrible, at the height of oprychnina (a policy of terror designed to silence or exterminate all inner dissent), gave rise to many interesting observations and insights. Most importantly, perhaps, for Poles, as well as for other some European observers, Muscovy under Ivan IV was seen as a cruel despotic monarchy - very much in contrast with with the republican state, with the personal freedoms it granted free citizens (nobility), a political tradition with which Polish authors, citizens of the republican and liberal Rzeczpospolita, felt the closest affinity.

As one Renaissance writer Łukasz Górnicki phrased it in his Dworzanin polski (Polish Courtier) of 1566, ‘There is not a worse place for people [to live] than under the tyranny of one individual; which is plain for everyone who sees in what harsh bondage the Turks, Vallachians and Muscovy live.’ Thus, in the eyes of Poles, its autocratic rule and lack of freedoms placed Muscovy closer to Asian peoples, such as Tatars or Turks, who were notorious for such a political model.

A scholar Tomasz Hodana concludes:

‘Along with the new conflicts and the appearance of new flash points (diplomatic disputes over recognition of the Tsar's title, rivalry for Livonia, expeditions of Stefan Batory), a country ruled by "schismatic despots" began to rise to the role of the greatest enemy, along with Turkey, of noble democracy and European civilization as a whole.”’

The Polish and European stereotype of Russia was just about to take shape.

Jan Kochanowski: ‘the tyrant of the Northern Part’

Representation of Ivan the Terrible in Maciej Stryjkowski's work Descriptio — Representation of Ivan the Terrible in Maciej Stryjkowski's work Kronika polska...

It was Ivan the Terrible who became the most real embodiment of this ugly stereotype of Russia. The Russian ruler, with his vast territorial ambitions and cruel inner politics, was perceived by the Polish elites as ‘an enemy of all freedom under the sky’ (as he is referred to in a letter from Polish king Zygmunt August to queen Elizabeth of England) - a perfect symbol of an alien despotic political system, wielding absolute power over his subjects, for which the Poles, who were very fond of their republican political system, felt nothing but contempt.

This idea was most perfectly expressed in the classical trope of the Tsar as a tyrant. It is present in the works of the greatest Polish poet of the Renaissance Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584). Kochanowski, who happened to be the exact contemporary of Ivan the Terrible, was an active participant of Poland’s political life; he also took part in at least one military campaign against Muscovy, the one led by king Zygmunt II August himself in 1567.

In one of his works, the epic poem Jezda do Moskwy (1583), a depiction of a 1581 Polish-Lithuanian military foray incursion deep into Russian territories, Kochanowski refers to the Russian ruler as a tyrant and ‘a murderer of innocent souls’. In another poem, written upon the re-taking of Polotsk by the Polish-Lithuanian forces, he calls him a cruel, ‘tyrant of the Northern Part’, a haughty megalomaniac ‘who deems no-one in the world equal to him’.

Ivan as a Christian anti-hero

The front page for Jan Kochanowski's Jazda do Moskwy, 1583 — The front page for Jan Kochanowski's Jazda polska, 1583

The figure of the tyrant, used across these poems, was a clear reference to ancient political philosophy, much cherished in the Commonwealth, namely the classical ancient Greek dichotomy between despotism and democracy, the tyrant and the democratic political body. As scholar Katarzyna Meller notes, ‘the idea of seeing despotisms as alien and inferior civilizationally was itself rooted in the ancient, Aristotelian identification of all despotic rules with the domain of Barbarians’.

The same scholar argues, that works like Kochanowski’s Jezda, ‘while not saying much about Muscovy directly, can be read as a literarily disguised confrontation of the two worlds, dressed in the elegant cloak of humanistic fashion: that of the civilization of Latinitas and that of the cold barbarian North; noble democracy and despotic monarchy’.

For Poles, the wars with Muscovy were perceived as a strife with a tyrant, who also epitomised the absolute moral evil. With his moral characteristics of cruelty, excessive pride and hubris, Ivan would come to represent an image of a Christian anti-hero. In this context, it can be quite telling that when Polish king Stefan Batory besieged Polotsk in 1579, he issued a manifesto in which he emphasised that he was waging war against the Tsar - and not the peaceful citizens of the town .

In the Polish (and European) conceptualizations of contemporary politics, Muscovy would increasingly come to be seen as ‘the old ruler of the Northern countries’ - itself lying beyond the range of the blessed effects of Latin civilization and its political traditions. As Meller points, ‘in the symbolic language of the political thought of the time the North became tightly bound up with the idea of tyranny’

Summing up the relevance of political discourse present in Kochanowski and other old-Polish authors with regard to Muscovy, Katarzyna Meller states:

Before western critical judgment got around to its definition of the ‘teleology of Russian tyranny’, and before learned political science described Muscovy's contra-civilizational socio-political order (with its inability to engender a pure idea of civic duty’), Old Polish authors were handling that reality competently and as if in passing, by means of their literary actio: invoking through Jezda's classical diction of free speech an idiom of latinitas with that integral aspect of regina libertas.’

Guagnini, Stryjkowski & Herberstein: ‘The unheard-of cruelty’

Siegmund Herberstein, Sarmatiae descriptio — Sarmatiae descriptio by Alessandro Guagnini, 1578

The depictions of Muscovy’s ruler and its people - represented as savage, threatening, haughty, barbarian, ferocious and obstinate - appeared regularly in Polish and Latin works by Kochanowski and his contemporaries.

The last decades of the 16th century saw the publication of two further important books which to a large extent shaped and perpetuated the image of Muscovy and its rule in Europe.

Alessandro Guagnini’s Sarmatiae Europae Descriptio (1578) contained, in the fifth chapter, the description of the ‘unheard-of cruelty” of the Russian satrap; its story is largely based on the first-hand account of the witness Albert Schelling, who was the Tsar’s prisoner in 1564-1570.

The same account became also one of the sources for Maciej Stryjkowski’s Kronika Polska, Litewska, Żmudzka i wszystkiej Rusi (1582). Stryjkowski was likely the first witness to record Schelling’s influential story.

The Muscovite chapters in the works by Guagnini and Stryjkowski, along with an earlier work by Siegmund von Herberstein (Rerum moscoviticarum commentarii, 1571), became among the most influential anti-Russian pamphlets in history. Its descriptions of cruelty, treacherousness, falsehood, savagery, and the slavish nature of the Muscovite people would shape the image and stereotype of the Russian state for generations to come.

Dymitriads & Grubianitas…

A historical image of Pseudo-Demetrius, or the False Dmitriy.

The Polish interest in things Muscovite continued in the early 17th century, when a series of political and military interventions by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, known as the Dimitriads, ended in the temporary occupation of the Kremlin. This time of turmoil, known in Russian history as the Time of Trouble, further contributed to Polish knowledge and stereotypes of Russia - and vice versa.

Polish diarists who spent that time in Russia, and who surely were not impartial to the matter, were struck by the fear and submissiveness manifested by the Tsar’s subjects, as well as by their violence and brutality (especially, with regard to those of their compatriots who surrendered).

Many Poles who witnessed first-hand the turmoil wrote later of the ‘vulgarity and obscenity of this folk’. Many were struck, in particular, by the lack of culture and education on the part of the Muscovite elites, which manifested in the absence of the good manners and etiquette typical of the upper classes in Europe (this also stretched to the codes of diplomacy). Many of these authors, who often had a thorough education, were particularly struck by the near total absence of celebratory speeches and oratorical performances, something the Poles considered an indispensable element of cultured human interaction.

This stretched also to science, studies and books. As one author noted, ‘there are no studies whatsoever here, nor do they make use of science, as it is forbidden’. Another author quoted an anecdote heard from one Golovin. According to that member of the Muscovite nobility, the tsar was so afraid that his subjects would become wiser than him, that he ordered that all the books that he himself couldn’t understand be burned. Effectively, as Polish authors concluded, Russians of the time had a very limited knowledge of the outside world, which basically consisted of a vague awareness of Poland, Lithuania and Germany.

The stereotype of Muscovy and Russian culture as inferior, barbarian, and primitive was a fairly common trope in Polish literature throughout the 17th century, a time when Polish culture was fashionable and influential in Muscovy, and when even the Tsar read Polish. Jan Chryzostom Pasek (1636-1701), author of a brilliant diary from the second half of the 17th century, who as a soldier was engaged in fighting with Muscovites, coined even - much in the macaronic style typical of his writings - a special word ‘grubianitas’ [churlishness, ‘scurrilitas’] to refer to this perceived aspect of Russian society.

Wacław Potocki: ‘Stupid Moscow’

Front page for "Muza polska" by Wacław Potocki — The front page of "Muza polska" by Wacław Potocki. Photo: Polona.pl

But at just around that time, stating openly in print what one thought about Russia started to be a tricky and dangerous matter. As Russia was entering its path towards modern colonial Empire, so its arsenal of pressure expanded.

An instructive case in point was the story of a work by Polish Baroque poet Wacław Potocki (1621-1696). Published anonymously in 1676, Potocki’s Muza Polska, a lengthy panegyrical epic about king Jan Sobieski, met with strong censure from a Russian resident in Warsaw Vasily Tiapkin. The sole reason for this was the use of phrases ‘durna Moskwa’ [stupid Muscovy] and ‘niewierna Moskwa’ [infidel Muscovy], scattered over the two thousand plus lines of the poem. The book became a bone of contention in Polish-Russian relations - a rhetorical but effective argument and a tool of pressure in subsequent negotiations between the two states. Ten years after the publication of the book - in the course of peace negotiations with Russia in 1686 - it was brought up by an official of the Russian Empire, one Golitsyn, as an argument justifying the fact of the non-returning of Kiiv to Poland.

The front page of Władysław IV by Samuel Twardowski. Upon the request of the Russian embassy the book was burned in Warsaw in 1649. Photo: wikimedia

‘In the book published by Potocki, there are things that one fears not only to speak of but even to mention, like “unfaithful Rus’”, “stupid Muscovy”, or “stubborn Muscovite”. Now Poles, how can you expect, that after such unbearable, cruel and manifest unpleasantness, you would be granted Kyiv? Is eternal peace between us possible at all?’

Another Russian author noted that ‘because of [Potocki’s] Muza polska, Kyiv and Smolensk will forever remain in the hands of the Tsar; poor Lithuania will pay for Potocki's audacity towards the tsar.’

Still, luckily for the author, Potocki’s work was able to avoid the fate of another poetic work of the era. Samuel Twardowski’s poem Władysław IV (Ladislaus IV), which contained similar unfavourable opinions about Muscovy, was burned in Warsaw in 1649, upon the request of the Russian ambassador, having been declared ‘insulting’ to the state of Russia. As one can see, burning and censoring books unfavorable to Russia has quite a history.

The dismantling of Poland… & the Russian text continues

Allegory of the 1st partition — An Allegory of the First Partition by Nicolas Noël Le Mire / Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, 1773, Photo: National Museum in Warsaw, nr inw. 64483

In the course of the next century Russia’s influence on Polish matters only deepened. Corrupting politicians, neutralising the political system, meddling in Poland’s inner affairs, introducing its army in Poland’s territories, along with putting further diplomatic pressure on Poland, became for Russia an effective way to subjugate Poland, leading ultimately to the partitions in the late 18th century.

That process remains to this day an instructive case in point, showcasing the purposeful and methodic undoing of a democratic state by an openly autocratic and dictatorial regime, coupled with other imperial states, sharing similar interests. As is usually the case, that political process was accompanied by an international marketing campaign, endorsed and paid for by Russia’s Catherine the Great (compare Voltaire’s anti-Polish witings), which represented Poland’s political system as backwards and ‘irreformable’.

Fortunately, due to its cultural capital as well as its earlier first-hand experience of Russian imperialism, Poland was able to respond with a whole array of ways to counter this political subjugation, from military uprisings to patriotic poetry and the subversive use of Aesopian language in literature. Certainly not the least important of these was developing a critical discourse regarding the modern Russian Empire, its nature and mode of being - a discourse whose beginnings have been described above and which, developed by the likes of Mickiewicz, Mochnacki, Krasiński and others, evolved over time into a formidable body of knowledge about the Empire and its doings. This would become over time a truly dangerous knowledge eventually engendering ways of resisting and countering the Empire.

Author: Mikołaj Gliński, February 2023

Language English

#Russia

19th century literature