Analysing cultural and literary trends, the author tries to find a place for Slavism in the awareness of today's Europe, and also to determine what in fact the Slavic identity is in its original and contemporary version - also in its renounced and rejected version.
Source of Polish version: www.wydawnictwoliterackie.pl
Maria Janion
- Niesamowita Slowianszczyzna / Uncanny Slavdom
Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakow 2006
123 x 197, 358 pages, paperback
ISBN 83-08-03928-6
www.wydawnictwoliterackie.pl
The book has been nominated for the 2007 Nike Literary Award.
SLAVDOM, THE ROMANTICS AND US
[Excerpts from the described book are translations made for the purpose of this article; for the original Polish article, see: Maria Janion "Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna"]
When was the founding Slavic myth born? Could it have been as rich and popular as the myths on Scandinavian prehistory or the mythologies of Greece and Rome? Is anything, and if so, then what, left today of that ancient, forgotten tradition?
Prof. Janion makes references to Romantic attempts at reconstructing ancient Slav mythology, to 19th-century treatises including Bronislaw Trentowski's "Wiara slowianska lub etyka piastujaca swiat" / "Slavic Faith, or Ethics Taking Care of the World" and Zorian Dolega Chodakowski's "O slowianszczyznie przed chrzescijanstwem" / "On Slavdom Before Christianity". Distant echoes of the views of Chodakowski, a scholar of primeval and pagan Slavdom, can be found in Romantic poetry, including Juliusz Slowacki or the rituals in [Adam Mickiewicz's] Dziady / Forefathers' eve.
However, one of the most lasting community bonds in Poland was always Christianity, Catholicism, which played a special role during the partitions [1795-1918], yielding the messianic concepts among other things. A nation deprived of statehood for over a century had quite a few current "matters for God" and waited for special signs. Afterwards, it was hard to break free, as Janion puts it, of the "fumes of messianic delusions". "Catholicism in Poland, constantly threatened in its religious and national identity in the 19th and 20th centuries, was treated as a consolation and an escape. ... The consolatory role of religion prevented people from sensing and experiencing an element of the supernatural", writes Maria Janion, and also invokes Simone Weil in the translation of Czeslaw Milosz. Contrary to the Polish tradition, Weil believed that "religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith". Perhaps this is also where one should seek the sources of the age-old aversion to Russia - the sacralization of Poland as the victim had to lead to the satanization of the invader.
It is precisely after one such extensive disquisition on the history of ideas that the author turns to the present and demonstrates that the greatest achievements of Polish literature in the previous century did not at all feed on the stereotype of martyrdom founded in the Romantic era: "Tadeusz Borowski's short stories and Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski's 'Inny Swiat' / 'A World Apart' do not share the view about Poland's innate moral superiority and being unblemished by any evil, and the equally innate, complete bestiality of Poland's Russian and German persecutors". She also analyses the latest images of Russia and the stereotype of the Russian in the works of writers as different as Dorota Maslowska and Mariusz Wilk.
In fact, Niesamowita Slowianszczyzna / Uncanny Slavdom is largely a book about the present time. In contemporary literature among other things, Janion finds attempts to move away from the traditional, Romantic notions of nation, community, and her sources even include press polemics, because perhaps it is in popular culture, in everyday, very common disputes that our awareness is revealed the most starkly, formed - as it turns out - by various old associations. Janion tracks down signs of the old Slavic myths in today's political discussions, proves how often we are slaves of the past in even the simplest social behaviours, and shows how hard it is to break free of a lasting complex of the old Europe from which we are allegedly separated by our Slavic, eastern, and northern otherness. We are still, as she writes, "east of the West and west of the East".
Author: Marek Radziwon, wiadomosci.gazeta.pl, June 10, 2007 - Polish version