‘The Spring to Come’ by Stefan Żeromski is probably one of the few novels about which both of these things can be said: there is a good chance that it will make it into the matura (Polish high school graduation) exam, which is why it is worth knowing it, and that it will provoke serious emotions, disputes or discussions during Polish language class.
The latter would probably concern not only the teacher’s question about the metaphor of the ‘glass houses’ and the allegory of ‘Nawłoć’, but even more often Cezary Baryka – the values he tried to follow at various moments, or the choices he made, both in politics and in love. Especially as the temperature of the hero’s decisions reaches critical points every now and then: whether in Baryka’s attitude towards his mother in Baku, then still deep within the Russian Empire, or in his loyalty to the three women in love with him in Nawłoć, or towards his Warsaw mentor and guardian Szymon Gajowiec. The Spring to Come is still being read – in spite of the blatant anachronisms of the Żeromski era, which become more pronounced with each decade – quite briskly. We follow the fate of little Czarek, who was growing up, spoilt and rebellious at the same time, then of a converted son accompanying his father on the repatriation route, then a soldier in the Polish-Bolshevik war and a guest at the Wielosławski aristocratic museum, a flirt and seducer, and finally a student, polemist and activist in Warsaw, flip-flopping between different views, although not carelessly, but with a sense of the significance of his choices. And there is one more thing worth adding here – this is a novel that bothers the reader and at times simply hurts.
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Stefan Żeromski in his study at the cottage in Nałęczów, 1906. Photo: National Library of Poland (POLONA)
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The Spring to Come is the most important Bildungsroman in the Polish Interwar period, a novel about the upbringing of a boy born far outside the Polish lands, yet marked by Polishness from birth, then a young man whose coming of age involves, among other things, a (re?)initiation into his native country, and at a time when the patterns of its culture are subject to intense negotiation. This is an interesting trick: we have an adolescent protagonist who, although being a ‘little Pole’, will by no means answer any of the subsequent questions of the ‘Catechism of a Polish child’ in the way that the author of the poem (Władysław Bełza) would expect him to. He neither lives ‘among his own people’, nor ‘in the Polish land’, nor does he love Poland, nor does he believe in it too much. All right, maybe at some point he will try to believe in it a little, and maybe he will even love his father’s mirages about it or the stories of Gajowiec – only to soon face disappointment.
Disillusionment is the key word for The Spring to Come and a testimony to how relevant this novel remains, despite being outdated here and there. After all, isn’t disillusionment a derivative of disenchantment? And isn’t the disenchantment of the world – the removal of fantastic veils from the hard experience of reality – the basis of the modern human condition? Every now and then, Baryka is seduced (ergo enchanted) by something: The vision of glass houses, the performance of masculinity at war (in the Polish-Bolshevik clashes of 1920), the girlish charm of Karolina Szarłatowicz and the feminine allure of Laura Kościeniecka, the achievements of the intelligentsia left of the ‘Varsovians’ summarised by a universally respected minister and Baryka’s ideological guide, or, finally, the revolutionary slogans of Antoni Lulek and other members of communist circles. Each of these spells touches some sensitive chord in the sensitive boy/adolescent/young man, but at the same time provokes resistance, prompting a dramatic withdrawal. None of these threads (with one exception, on which more later) Baryka drags on any longer. He breaks more bonds, compromises himself and dishonours those who trusted him, flees in shame or is banished, suffers and inflicts suffering.
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Mateusz Damięcki on the set of The Spring to Come, directed by Filip Bajon, 2000. Photo: Jacek Szymczak/Forum
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Cezary is modern not only because he lives outside the regulations of the decalogue, but precisely because he finds no alternative to it – and therefore because he is also not taken in by any other myth, that he relativises every belief, questions every narrative, and undermines and invalidates passion (in the broad sense of the word). ‘All that is solid melts into air’ – not coincidentally, it was this quote from Karl Marx that the American thinker Marshall Berman considered quintessentially the ‘experience of modernity’ and used it as the title of his most important book.
The Spring to Come is not only a text about the upbringing of Cezary Baryka, but also a masterpiece of a political novel about the rise and maturation of Poland – of its working classes to political agency and of its upper classes to restrain their lordly customs. In the humanities, attention is often drawn to the special status of the ‘stranger’, the ‘Other’ – on the one hand, his otherness becomes an object of anxiety, disgust or fascination for a given community, on the other hand, such a newcomer is frequently considered capable of seeing things that are transparent to the autochthons, so he is often entrusted with settling disputes and passing judgement. This is precisely why Żeromski chooses as his protagonist a repatriate from distant Baku – a boy who, admittedly, speaks Polish and knows most of the Polish cultural codes, but at the same time is not entangled in major biographical disputes. Initially he is neither a nationalist nor a socialist, even his state or class affiliation is not specified, or at least does not play a radically defining role in his life.
Baryka crosses the Polish border not only as an orphan, but also as a man without a stable worldview. His path in life allows him to naively look around the nooks and crannies of the young Second Rzeczpospolita and only then form an opinion for himself: in the army and during the patriotic, wartime agitation, in the manor houses, among the noble monuments, which are as graceful as they are anachronistic, among the peasants and workers (whom the boy tries every now and then to get close to and get to know, but usually without success, because his close relations with representatives of the elite make them distrustful...), among Warsaw students and communist conspirators. In this socio-political layer of the novel, Baryka is no longer the main character, but a magnifying glass – one that distorts the picture as little as possible – into what is still wrong in young Poland. Viewed by the ‘stranger’ Baryka, the interwar Rzeczpospolita is still a country in search of its leading narrative (Dr Baryka’s glass houses? Edward Abramowski’s cooperative movement? The quasi-positivism of Gajowiec?), stupefied by the Sarmatian myth on the one hand and the lying promises of capitalism on the other. It is an arena of by no means diminishing wealth disparities and intensifying class conflicts. Finally, it is a country torn between the intellectual and political ferment of the great cities (especially Warsaw) and the indelible parochialism of the provinces, where the nobility still party hard and the peasantry toil in the fields. The Poland of the early 1920s is internally conflicted and incapable of consistent, society-wide transformation to a degree no less than Cezary Baryka himself.
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Małgorzata Lorentowicz (Laura Kościeniecka) and Adam Hanuszkiewicz (Cezary Baryka) in the stage production of The Spring to Come, directed by Adam Hanuszkiewicz, Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw, 1964. Photo: Edward Hartwig Photographic Archive / National Digital Archives (NAC)
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In his collection of essays entitled Przedwiośnie czy Potop (The Spring to Come or The Deluge), Andrzej Mencwel cites a number of controversies that the novel discussed here caused in the early twenties. These stemmed from the fact that, at the time of the book’s publication in 1924, Żeromski already held the position of the most important of the ‘Polish writers’ – ‘Polish’, i.e. those who practised a ‘Polish kind of creative work’. Although this position of the writer was not questioned, the novel was said to be a text ‘without God, without ethics, without work and without law’, and the author was accused of, among other things, ‘licentiousness’ (Laura) and corruption (after all, ironically, Baryka had beaten a Bolshevik!). For The Spring to Come is a non-obvious work in the writer’s oeuvre, which may be illustrated by the fact that the author himself finally saw fit to explain its meaning. And what bothered the critics (or rather: the nigglers) the most was the last scene of the novel, in which Baryka found himself in the communist workers’ march on Belvedere and not only walked with them, but at some point ‘stepped out of the ranks’ and ‘pushed separately against [...] the grey wall of soldiers’. This is where the story ends and, to tell the truth, we do not know how it happened that a boy who had been thrown out of a meeting of revolutionaries and who was himself disgusted with the course of the meeting suddenly appeared at the head of the riots, nor can we really believe – based on our previous knowledge of Baryka’s instability and inconsistency – that this new political affiliation would turn out to be permanent. And it is completely impossible for us to guess which interpretation was closest to the author’s intention.
Certainly, however, The Spring to Come is not only a chronicle of the disenchantments and disappointments of the fictional protagonist, but also a testimony to Żeromski’s own confusion and doubts, and perhaps even disappointment and bitterness. This depressing process must have lasted only a few years for him. Less than a month before 11th November 1918, a state called the Republic of Zakopane was established near the Tatra Mountains. This political entity was, of course, ephemeral in nature and its storytelling potential outweighs its historical or military significance, but it is nevertheless worth mentioning here because the first Polish leader, or president, after several decades was none other than Stefan Żeromski. Both he and many other activists of the several-dozens-days-old Zakopane republic were recruited from among the army men seeking health in the local spas. At this time, the provisional armed forces of the Republic disarmed a small detachment of Austrians stationed at the resort, took over the arsenal and Zakopane’s communications equipment. In November, Żeromski and his Council handed over sovereignty over Podhale to the newly established Second Rzeczpospolita. Thus, not only did the author of Ashes do much to nurture Polish morale, but he also went down in the history of the restoration of Polish statehood.
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Stefan Żeromski (center) in the Tatra Mountains, 1916. Photo: National Library of Poland (Polona.pl)
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We have not evoked this mountain tale merely for its anecdotal allure. The Spring to Come, written half a decade later, is sometimes included in the strand of other politicised novels devoted to ideological disputes, such as Zofia Nałkowska’s Romance of Teresa Hennert (also 1924) or Andrzej Strug’s Generation of Marek Świda from 1925. Meanwhile, following in the footsteps of the Bildungsroman genre, we can boldly reach beyond the borders of Polish lands, more specifically to the Berghof sanatorium, as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was also published in 1924. Its protagonist, Hans Castorp and Cezary Baryka are only a few years apart, but the meaning of the arch-modern novel of German literature is in a sense exactly the opposite of our ‘modernising’ arch-Polish novel. If Castorp ascends in his story, Baryka descends. While Castorp, leaving for the Alps and then overstaying his welcome there, gradually breaks his ties with ‘reality’, i.e. with his patrician family, and crosses out the certain scenario of professional success, Baryka lands on the harsh Polish plain after the first period of life in Baku, which for a long time appeared to him as a space of unlimited possibilities (let us recall that the young gentleman and his friends flew there in aeroplanes). Mann’s protagonist immerses himself more and more in the charms of the Swiss mountain with every month of his stay in the Alpine spa, while Baryka is the porte-parole of Żeromski, who, in turn, reached the peak of his political commitment in the highest-placed Polish spa – a commitment which sounds like a fairy tale.
The Spring to Come, this great (though not very voluminous) and paradoxical – unmasking and myth-making at the same time – novel is worth reading in a context broader than local. Also in order to think critically about Polish culture and its place in the civilisation of the so-called West.
