Polish Protagonists of British Literature: Insurgents, Refugees, Artists… & Sexy Car Mechanics

middlemarch 1994 fot BBC .jpg, default, Can you find a Pole? Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislaw (first from left) in 1994 BBC production od Middlemarch

#language & literature

We’re taking a tour around modern English language literature to see how British authors, from Jane Porter and Claire Clairmont to Catherine Mansfield and Frederick Forsythe, represented Poles and Polishness in their novels. What do these figures of noble insurgents, fugitive spies, dogged emigrants and irresistible car mechanics tell us about the changing British perception of Polish identity from the early 19th until early 21st century.

A rather subjective overview of a special fraternity of Thaddeuses, Ladislases, Sonias, Wandas and Ryszards.

1. Thaddeus Sobieski – Polish patriot & a true scion of the British nobility

Jane Porter, ‘Thaddeus of Warsaw’ (1803)

Thaddeus of Warsaw by Jane Porter (cover)

It is 1794, and we’re in Poland, where a young Polish nobleman of royal lineage Thaddeus Sobieski is about to take part in the national uprising against Russia led by his namesake Tadeusz Kościuszko. After a series of battles, one of which ends in Kościuszko being taken captive, and another leads to the destruction of Warsaw by the forces of general Suvorov, the protagonist returns to his family mansion (Wilanów palace) to find it in ruin. As the uprising falls so does the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Thaddeus who has now lost his home, family and homeland, decides to flee. Inspired by his mother’s death-bed revelation, claiming that his father is actually a Brit, Thaddeus embarks on a voyage to England.

Thus begins the English chapter of one of the most popular books of the 19th century, yet largely forgotten today, Thaddeus of Warsaw by Jane Porter. In London, despite lack of financial means or political connections, the Polish refugee makes a surprisingly swift social career, marrying in the end an English lady, and even finding his long-lost father, who turns out to be a British aristocrat.

In achieving all this, Thaddeus exhibits a truly impeccable character – he defends women from bullies, rescues children from fires, cares for the sick and poor, and even avoids the temptations of married women. That aspect of Thaddeus’ character rendered him a bit of an unrealistic character – a fact noticed already by contemporary readers, one of whom called Thaddeus ‘a faultless monster’, ‘being unnaturally perfect’.

But Thaddeus wasn’t pure fantasy. He was at least partially inspired by a real-life figure of Tadeusz Kościuszko whose short stay in England in 1797 (after he was released from the Tsar’s captivity) inspired a true ‘Kosciuszko craze’ in British elite circles, with poems written in his honour and pilgrimages made to his house. One of such enthusiastic pilgrims to Kościuszko was, in fact, Jane Porter’s brother.

But Thaddeus’ character also owes a lot to the royal lineage of the magnanimous king John III Sobieski. All of which makes him a rather fantastic mix of all that can be considered best and greatest about Poland. Meanwhile, his easy path to assimilation in British society (including the British pedigree revealed in the plot) makes him also a British success story, perhaps a case for an ultimate Polish-British literary hero of all time.

Immensely popular in its day (the novel had 80 imprints throughout the 19th century), Thadeus of Warsaw also made a career on the other side of the Atlantic where children were named in his honor (cf. inventor Theodore Thaddeus Sobieski Laidley is the aviation pioneer Thaddeus Sobieski Lowe), and towns were renamed Warsaw.

Largely forgotten today, Thaddeus Sobieski is indisputably one of the most popular and influential Polish literary protagonists of all time, and a god-father to many Polish characters in British literature to come: insurgents, refugees, migrants and noble spirits – featured in this article.

2. Ladislas – ‘student, hero, soldier, spy’

Claire Clairmont, ‘The Pole’ (1832)

Claire Clairmont, by Amelia Curran. Photo: Wikimedia

Fast forward to three decades later and it’s another full-scale revolt against Russian rule in Poland (that is, the November Uprising of 1830). But we’re in Italy where a mysterious stranger is making his way towards Naples. His name is Ladislas and, as it will soon transpire, he is not only a hero of the uprising (‘the hero of Ostrolenka, Vistula, Belveder’) but also an undercover agent on a secret mission from his homeland, carrying papers that can compromise the Tsar’s position in European diplomacy.

This of course makes Ladislas a target for Russians who will use all means necessary to terminate the mission that poses existential threat to their state. For this they’re using the charms and influence of Princess Dashkoff. Known as Corinna of the North, Dashkoff has been running a fashionable salon in Naples and has been presenting herself as a dissident from Petersburg ‘detesting the cold barbarism of her country’ when in fact she’s an undercover agent (sleeper agent, as we would say today) working for the Russian government. Dashkoff, who is as ruthless as she is duplicitous, hires the local ruffians to kill our man.

Fortunately, Ladislas is not alone. In the course of his Napolitan adventure he happens to meet other fellow Poles, in fact, an entire patch-work Polish family – dysfunctional children of a Polish general from the Kościuszko insurrection: Marietta (who sings for him in Polish), Giorgio (who tries to kill him) and Idalie (with whom he falls in love and marries). The story, which has at least partially a happy ending (Giorgio excluding), offers typical staple elements of such sensational tales, like beautiful Mediterranean scenery, bands of Italian brigands, a masked assassin, a love at first sight, and even a dagger duel in the moonlit ruins of Paestum. For Polish readers, the bonus comes in scattered Polish words and supposedly Polish songs.

Clairemont’s story is remarkable for multiple reasons. First, as scholars have noted, the complicated relationship between the Pole and the Polish siblings can be seen as a reflection of Clairmont’s own romantic engagements, involving her sister Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Shelley (Ladislas) and George Byron (Giorgio) – Claire’s one time lover.

More importantly for us, The Pole is one of the first literary echoes of the November uprising in British fiction, shaping the myth of Polish heroic fight against Russian despotism (in particular the battle of Ostrolenka is stylised as a modern Termopylae, with 300 Warsaw students coming to rescue) and its heroes, like Ladislas. Its presentation of Russia as a wicked and ruthless regime, whose tentacles reach far beyond the borders of the Empire, can also be seen as quite pioneering and indeed far-sighted. It may come as no surprise that Clairmont knew Russia first hand having spent three years in the late 1820’s.

3. Will Ladislaw, or a Polish scion in Great Britain

George Eliot, ‘Middlemarch’ (1871–72)

Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislas in BBC film production Middlemarch

For another Ladislas (vel Ladislaw vel Władysław), we travel straight into the heart of the British canon of 19th century realist literature, as represented by George Elliot’s novel Middlemarch. Middlemarch takes place across a couple of years in the early 1830s and features several characters and plot lines, one of which brings us to the story of Miss Dorothea Brooke. The woman marries an older man, but it is his cousin Will Ladislaw who is bound to become her true love – and one of the key characters of the novel.

When Dorothea encounters Will for the first time, he is a young man, shortly after his studies in Heidelberg, and very much a romantic soul formed by the German idealist school. He is full of lofty and romantic ideals and lives the life of an artist – all of which, as we are led to believe, might be a legacy of his Polish genealogy. After all, Will is the grandson of a Polish patriot, refugee, and a talented artist, whose relationship with a British woman, as we’re told, was considered a mésalliance of sorts.

Despite the fact that his Polishness is a bit watered-down (Will is only one-quarter Polish), he is still looked on as an alien by British high society. This is especially the case when he moves into the provincial Middlemarch, where his ‘dangerously mixed blood’ and ‘queer genealogy’ comes to the fore. Will engages in political activity, working as an editor at a local newspaper, espousing liberal and progressive positions, and he becomes a proponent of the reform movement, which eventually contributes to shaping a more democratic political system.

The tale has a happy ending for Will, who not only marries Dorothea but also becomes ‘an ardent public man’, earning a seat in the British parliament. Middlemarch can be read as a story of social success, inclusivity and continuity. As we learn in the Finale, Will and Dorothea went on to have children – which, for us, of course, means more Polish protagonists.

4. Janko Gooral and ‘the dread of an inexplicable strangeness’

Joseph Conrad, ‘Amy Foster’ (1901)

It’s probably no surprise that Joseph Conrad, one of the greatest British writers of all time, whose work and philosophy was heavily influenced by his Polish background, created also some of the most interesting Polish characters in British literature, just to mention Prince Roman or Janko Gooral. The latter character, a central figure in Conrad’s 1903 short story Amy Foster, appears especially interesting as he also carries some potential parallels with Conrad’s biographical experience as an emigre in Great Britain.

When Janko Gooral first appears in the small seaside English community he comes across as a tramp, and ‘a dangerous maniac’, a wild almost inhuman creature that people are afraid of, and kids throw stones at. Like a wild animal, he is ultimately restricted in a wood-lodge (like ‘a bear in a cage’). It is only later that it becomes clear that Janko is the only survivor from a maritime disaster of a ship bound for America – and originally a migrant from the mountainous regions of Poland (hence his Polish last name Gooral, which translates as ‘Mountaineer’).

Thanks to an act of kindness by a simple local girl, the titular Amy, Janko is invited back into the world of human civilization. And yet this world, even after the couple fall in love and marry, remains deeply hostile towards the newcomer.

Janko pines away for his homeland and struggles in a foreign environment (where everything is different than at home). His fervent religiousness, poor knowledge of the English language, and emotional disposition, prone to sudden ruptures and spasms, set him apart from the locals – as he remains a deeply lonely figure, despite his marriage to a local girl who bears him a child. It's a deep irony that it is his beloved native Polish language that is considered a threat to the community, and ultimately contributes to Janko’s downfall.

He was different: innocent of heart, and full of good will, which nobody wanted, this castaway, that, like a man transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future.

But rather than a portrait of a failed Polish emigrant in Britain, Janko comes across as the ultimate figure of an inexplicable and unsurpassable strangeness, a condition of foreignness that cannot be truly ‘domesticated’. Janko is associated with someone or something utterly alien, in deed, ‘a man transplanted into another planet’. As such his figure certainly transcends the Polish experience and its representations in literature.

His foreignness had a peculiar and indelible stamp. At last people became used to seeing him. But they never became used to him.

Thus Janko stands for something that other people can never become used to, and who will always make people around him feel uneasy experiencing ‘the dread of an inexplicable strangeness’. As such he also remains an essential literary figure of all misfits, outsiders, and aliens.

5. Sonia Godowska, or Modern Soul

Katherine Mansfield, ‘Modern Soul in: In a German Pension’ [1911]

We skip to 1909 Bavaria where a young 20-something wanna-be writer from New Zealand was spending her days in Bad Wörishofen, one of the many Southern German resort towns at the time offering fashionable Wasserkur (or water treatment) to its visitors. That writer was the now firmly established modernist classic Katherine Mansfield – her satirical observations made at Pension Müller and other residencies would eventually make it into her debut book of short stories, titled In a German Pension (1911).

One of the stories, A Modern Soul, features a titular character of fraulein Sonia Godowska, a very poetic and gushing actress from Vienna. Fond of Ibsen and other specialists on modern human soul, she is constantly accompanied by her bereaved, black-clad mother, with whom she shares quite a complicated and tense relationship. As Sonia says, ‘My tragedy is my mother. Living with her I live with the coffin of my unborn aspirations.’

At the high point of a little recital concert, given on one night at the pension, Sonia gives an inspired improvisation (‘She implored us not to go into the woods in trained dresses, but rather as lightly draped as possible, and bed with her among the pine needles’). Followed by a poison scene (with the assistance of her mother’s pill vial and the arm-chair replaced by a chaise longue), the performance receives a standing ovation.

But this turns out not to be the end of her performance. For, as Sonia says, ‘You see, when I act I am’. The evening walk with the narrator ends in a little disaster for the actress who is extremely prone to mood swings and whose spirit, as she says, starves of mysterious perfume and magical atmosphere of Vienna, unattainable in this provincial small town. As the actress experiences a shock, resulting from a blatantly prosaic response of her interlocutor, she faints rather theatrically, only to be rescued by the most unromantic of all potential saviours, a trombone-blowing German Professor. Now, what could that bring about?

While not much apart from the last name attests to fraulein Godowska’s Polishness (as we can surmise, her acting career is in German, and her dead father, presumably Godowski, is long dead), there’s a possibility that her character was at least partially inspired by another Polish artist, namely, Wanda Landowska (1879-1959), a Polish-Jewish composer and virtuoso of modern harpsichord whom Katherine Mansfield may have met that year in Bavaria.

All of which ultimately makes Godowska more decidedly Polish.

6. Poor Wanda, or the pangs of a religious zealot (and a lesbian)

Radclyffe Hall, ‘The Well of Loneliness’ (1928)

Dubbed the first lesbian Bildungsroman in world literature, The Well of Loneliness caused a major social scandal upon its publication in Britain in 1928. While there certainly existed gay novels, not much was written in terms of realistic depiction of lesbian life before Radclyffe-Hall’s pioneering novel.

The book offers a semi-autobiographical story of a British writer Stephen Gordon and her relationship with another woman named Mary. In the second part of the novel much of that takes place against the backdrop of an artistic milieu of modern Paris where a group of bohemian women enjoy their lives in an attempt to escape the oppressive society.

One of the most interesting characters in this circle is a struggling Polish avant-garde painter named Wanda. Brought up in ravaged Poland in a conservative Catholic family (her all three brothers became priests and almost saints, for that), Wanda fled to Paris – as we are led to believe – to escape the oppressive community that has little understanding for queer people like her.

In Paris, Wanda engages in artwork creating enormous avant-garde paintings as well as in tumultuous social life, the latter also includes heavy drinking (Wanda prefers brandy). When drunk Wanda plays mandolin and sings Polish love songs and occasionally quarrels with random men. As the narrator suggests, her addiction may have to do with partially suppressed sexual identity (‘She drank, oh, yes, Wanda drowned her sorrows’). As a result her love life is also chaotic and random (She loved wildly, without either chart or compass).

Perhaps Wanda’s most curious characteristic comes in her zealous and tormented religiosity. Like a pilgrim, with whom she is compared, she regularly visits the Sacre Coeur in Montmartre, where she prays fervently kneeling in front of the silver Christ. That Catholic religious zeal seems also present in her most inspired rants about her tormented homeland (‘her most unhappy country’).

All in all, ‘the impulsive, erratic Wanda’ is a tormented character whose psyche is full of contradictions (‘an extremist she was in all things, this Wanda’). As the narrator put it,

‘Wanda saw largely. All that she envisaged was immense, her pictures, her passions, her remorses’. A ‘misjudged and very unfortunate genius,’ Wanda ultimately becomes a symbol of a wasted life, deserving our empathy and pity. ‘[B]ut for an unforeseen accident of birth, Wanda might even now have been a great painter,’ we’re told.

The larger-than-life figure of the lesbian artist Wanda begs questions regarding her real-life prototype. Scholars have pointed to Hanna Het-Kwiatkowska (1882–1956), a Polish avant-garde painter (and a lesbian woman) who was active in Paris in the 1920’s before moving to Southern France with her partner in the 1930’s. Other potential candidates include – surprise, surprise! – Wanda Landowska.

7. Stephan Zelli, or an art dealer that blew it

Jean Rhys, ‘Quartet’ (1929)

For our next literary Pole, we’re not moving anywhere… We’re staying in the same 1920’s Paris, teeming with nightlife in cafes, artistic boheme, British painters… and petty Polish art dealers slash black marketeers? The latter is pretty much exactly the profession of Stephan Zelli – one of the heroes of Jean Rhys’ 1929 novel The Quartet.

He was a short, slim, supple young man of thirty-three or four, with very quick, bright brown eyes and an eager but secretive expression. He spoke English fairly well in a harsh voice and (when he was nervous) with an American accent.

Zelli (could that be short for Zieliński?) is married to the novel’s protagonist Marya Hughes (‘British by birth, Polish by marriage’), a former chorus girl in London. When we meet them, the two have been living a rather crazy life in Paris for over four years (but Stephan had been a resident there for much longer). Sometimes penniless, sometimes rich, they live in a cheap hotel in Montmartre, enjoying the Montmarte-like kind of lifestyle. As Marya later recalls ‘the charm of her life with Stephan’ was about ‘[t]he vagabond nights, the fresh mornings, the long sleepy afternoons spent behind drawn curtains.’ There are also nights spent with friends in numerous bars and dives of this lively district.

The shifting prosperity of their life has to do with Stephan’s profession: ‘a commissionaire d’objets d’art, pictures and other things,’ is what he calls it. The items he sells (‘invariably to foreigners’) range from 12th-century paintings of Madonnas to Napoleon’s sabre or a rocking-horse which one of Millet’s children once played with. Marya on her part never questions him, as she knows he tends to lie when pressed.

[S]he told herself that this stranger and alien was probably a bad lot. But she felt strangely peaceful when she was with him.

In fact, for the first time in her life she feels she’s really happy. That is until Stephan is arrested on the charge – actually several charges – of theft. He is sentenced to a year in prison, followed by an expulsion from France.

The subsequent developments revolve around Marya’s attempts to stay afloat economically in Paris without her husband – as well as make sense of her romantic life. But Stephan does return in the finale of the story, and Marya is at one point even considering eloping with him on the train eastward, ‘thudding across the great plain of Europe. With Stephan. Hundreds of miles of plain for the wind to sweep over.’

All in all it’s a bitter ending for the couple, terminating in an irreparable falling out, the consequences of which should take our Polish hero even further away from Paris, perhaps Argentina.

For us, while not much in Rhys’ novel is associated with his nationality, Stephan is an interesting representation of Polishness – part of the same artistic milieu of early 20th century Montmartre where many Polish artists flocked, but inhabiting its more shady side. While not necessarily a fence, Stephan’s art dealing is definitely fraudulent. Meanwhile, his character – secretive but also vivid (‘natural as an animal’), impulsive ‘though always in a careful and businesslike manner’ which once fascinated Marya Hughes, would probably deserve more thorough reflection.

8. Viktor Kovalski, a brute with a soft heart

Frederick Forsyth, ‘The Day of the Jackal’ (1971)

Polish poster by Eryk Lipiński for the 1973 movie The Jackall

Victor Kowalski is a hulking giant of a man working as a bodyguard for the leader of the Secret Army Organisation (OAS) – a far-right French paramilitary organisation active at the time of the Algerian War and operating with the aim of preventing Algeria from gaining independence from France’s colonial rule. At the peak of its activity, the OAS was engaging in multiple terrorist operations, like preparing an assassination attempt on France’s president Charles de Gaulle – precisely the story depicted by Frederick Forsyth in his 1971 ground-breaking political thriller The Day of the Jackal.

Reticent and withdrawn, Kowalski is fully loyal to his commander, colonel Marc Rodin whom he met in Indochina while serving in Légion étrangère. Not much of a thinker himself, Victor is fully reliant on Rodin and quite probably shares his worldview; the latter claims that the present French government is a band of traitors who betrayed the nation and army, wrought chaos to the Legion, leaving Algeria and Indochina to the mercy of terrorists. And for Kovalski, Colonel Marc Rodin is always right.

Kowalski is callous, brutal and ruthless. He once broke the jaw of a man who flirted with his girlfriend, beat her up and threatened to kill her if she decided to abort his child. Perhaps more importantly, he knows very well how to kill people with cold blood.

But Wiktor wasn’t always like that. He was only twelve when his parents and sister were killed by the Nazis in Poland during WWII. He spent the war years in the woods with Polish underground resistance forces. It was there that he learned to kill – something that would prove quite useful in Indochina and Algeria with the French Foreign Legion, which he joined after he had killed a French salesman in Marseille in a botched robbery attempt.

But this callous and seemingly heartless man has also a soft spot – a love for his daughter Sylvie, who is being raised by Wikor’s only friend, a fellow Pole and a former legionnaire, Jojo Grzybowski. It is through an intricate intrigue concerning Sylvie’s supposed illness that the French secret service is eventually able to lure the unsuspecting Victor to France where he is abducted, interrogated, tortured and eventually electrocuted to death. In the gruesome process the tough guy reveals the codename of the assassin (Chacal!) which propels the investigation.

All in all, Victor is a curious character – a lonesome brute, portrayed here much in accordance with the American tradition of portraying Kowalskis in film and literature – Viktor hides a sensitive side, a soft heart dedicated fully to his little girl who doesn’t even know who her real father is.

9. Ryszard Brankowski, or a sexy car mechanic in Ireland

Paul Murray, ‘The Bee Sting’ (2023)

To wrap this one up, we jump to a small Midlands town in Ireland where the Barnes family, once prosperous and wealthy, now hit by the financial crisis of 2007, is slowly being undone by circumstances, and gravitating towards a very private end of their world. But while the downfall of the family is certainly not to be blamed on any one factor or figure in Paul Murray’s novel The Bee Sting, the facilitating role of one character in particular comes to mind.

That figure is Ryszard Brankowski, a Polish immigrant landing a job as a car mechanic at Dickie Barnes’ car business. An outsider in the small town community, Richard may speak with an accent (described as Polish or Eastern European, with a touch of Dublin and London) and may have problems explaining himself in English, but he’s also surprisingly clever and confident when it comes to playing out different members of the Barnes family. In manipulating them, he’s not afraid to use his sexual charm and cunning and even engage in criminal activity. A depiction of his ways makes for an important aspect of the book adding up to a truly complex portrait of a fascinating and seductive figure.

Ryszard is about 25, slim and extremely handsome – or as the narrator suggests, even beautiful. He has black curly hair and black shiny eyes, and his arms are all covered in tattoos (whether one of them depicts a Nazi symbol, remains a mystery). He drives an old saab and, at one point, even sleeps in it. He smokes heavily. For some he looks like a villain, or maybe a terrorist. Another character says he looks like a vampire from the 80’s.

While we see Ryszard mostly through the eyes of different narrators, we learn very little from himself, for that sake, about his background. The few reminiscences reveal only that the town in Poland where he grew up was located near a forest where thousands of people had been murdered during World War Two. (The story may also suggest that Ryszard believes in ghosts).

Perhaps the most penetrating insight into Ryszard’s psyche and its unsounded depths comes from his girlfriend who compares him to a house, in which no-one has ever lived. It’s new, pretty but unfinished. The rooms are painted ecru, but the floor can be ripped apart any time by the trees which grow beneath it.

The figure of Ryszard Brankowski, a sexy and charismatic car mechanic from Poland, is certainly one of the most captivating literary representations of not only a Pole but also a foreigner, a work immigrant, trying to make a living in The British Isles in the early decades of the 21st century.

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