Authors: Neal Ascherson
Marek Karpiriski, 'Jacek Kaczmarski - Aneks do wniosku o awans', in
PULS,
Nos 64/5, Sept-Dec
1993
I am back, and I remain as much of a barbarian as my forefathers!
The Squire in Mickiewicz's
The Confederates of Bar,
who has just returned from a tour of Western
Europe
DEBATES ABOUT NATIONALISM
tend to revolve around the concept of the nation as 'imagined community'. The phrase comes from Benedict Anderson's short and brilliant book of that title, and there is much to be said for it. Early modern nationalism, he argued, arose from an imaginative leap: the assumption by individuals that thousands or millions of people whom they would never meet
shared their particular culture, language and outlook. In the time before mass communications or easy travel, this assumption about solidarity was fostered by what Anderson called 'the print revolution', the circulation of printed literature written in the vernacular, but it remained an act of faith.
Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europe experienced a widespread 'invention of nations'. Intellectuals assembled ballads and oral traditions into 'national literatures', synthesised standard written languages out of dialects, and composed histories of the nation from chronicles and folk-epics. From every capital city, a legion of Wolfgang Feursteins set out for the villages with notebook and pencil. They worked to a teleology: the belief that a reawakened national community would set out on the journey towards supreme self-realisation as an independent nation-state.
Yet the nation, as imagined or even forged community, is far older than the nation-state. It existed before the political mobilisation made possible by the print revolution. It will, in fresh mutations, exist when the nation-state has passed into history. Indeed, the practice of inventing history to legitimise some aspiring social group is also older than modern Romantic nationalism. John Dee, the Welsh wizard and con-man, seduced Elizabeth I of England with his argument that, as the Tudor descendant of Welsh kings, she had re-established the Celtic realm of Arthur not only over all 'Britain' but over the mythical Arthurian empire beyond the ocean: the Americas, announced Dee, were the rightful inheritance of this 'Great Britain'. But no sleight of history is stranger, or more laced with ironies, than the resurrection of Sarmatia.
At the end of the twentieth century, we think of Poland as a country of the Baltic shore. Polish origins seem to us to lie among proto-Slav farmers, settled along the river Vistula as it flows north to reach the Baltic in the Bay of
Gdansk.
But there was a time when Poland looked towards the Black Sea as its native coast, and when Poles claimed ancestry in a race of Indo-Iranian pastoral nomads -the Sarmatians.
In the sixteenth century, Polish writers began to assert that Poles were the descendants of the Sarmatians. At first, this claim did not seem grotesque. It was no more than a Polish response to a European fashion. In the Renaissance, the flattering of dynasties
through genealogies dug out of classical learning had become a literary convention — driven forward, indeed, by the print revolution which made Greek and Roman histories available to courtiers. If Elizabeth of England was the heiress of the pre-Saxon Britons, if the Swedish kings were descendants of the Goths, the French kings sprung from Gaulish loins and the Muscovite tsars (in a particularly weird conceit) related through Rurik to the emperor Augustus, then it was not too eccentric for the Polish commonwealth to boast of origins in a race of Iranian 'barbarians' from the Black Sea.
But then, in the next hundred years, the Sarmatian myth took an extraordinary, freakish twist of its own. From being the official myth of a court, 'Sarmatism' became the mass faith of a class.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Polish nobility
(szlachta)
came to believe that it was they — not the Polish population at large — who were the exclusive descendants of the Sarmatians. They were not just a superior caste within Polish society, but a different race. Other classes, like burghers or peasants, must therefore have other, inferior racial origins. Soon, more pseudo-classical borrowing allowed scholars to refer to the lower orders as 'Getae' or 'Gepids' - lesser tribes of Thracian or Germanic origin, who were imagined to have migrated into east-central Europe as slaves of the noble Sarmatians.
The
szlachta
dominated the old Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. This enormous social group came to number something like
10
per cent of the population. Its members ranged from princely families wealthier than many European kings to muddy-arsed squireens who dug and hoed their own patches of rye. Its obscure origins lay in a clan system, recruited by military allegiance and adoption as much as by hereditary connection: a pattern which resembled traditional society in the Scottish
Gaeltacht
rather than the feudal order of Western Europe.
This 'Sarmatian Ideology' had a clear legitimising function. In the commonwealth, or 'royal republic', the nobility had achieved almost total ascendancy over the state. They elected the king. They composed the
Sejm
(parliament) and enforced on it the rule of unanimity: the Liberum Veto, which allowed a single dissenting voice to block all proceedings. They established, step by step, their own immunity to any central interference with their own limitless privileges. The
szlachta
did not so much rule as prevent anyone from ruling. This gave rise to the curious proverb that
'Polska w nierzqdem stop
— roughly, that Poland is founded upon disorder (the word
nierzqd
also has connotations of prostitution, like the French use of
bordel
to mean chaos or the English legal expression 'disorderly house', meaning a brothel). In this view, the
szlachta
alone constituted the true nation, and as Sarmatians its members were entitled to do as they pleased. That was the so-called Golden Freedom for which the
szlachta
repeatedly took up arms.
In the course of the seventeenth century, other elements were added to the ideology. One was xenophobia. Sarmatism was devoutly conservative, a hymn of thanksgiving addressed to the status quo. To the Sarmatian eye, Poland was perfect: Poland was the nobleman's paradise, the bravest, wisest and happiest
Terra Felix
on earth. It seemed to follow that any proposal for change was a threat of pollution by foreign influence. Royal initiatives to raise taxes or reform administration were attacked as the work of German or French advisers, poisoning the mind of the king in order to introduce absolutism and subvert Polish independence. The Reformation, especially for the middle and lower nobility, was perceived as another disruptive import from Bohemia and Germany, embraced by vulgar non-Sarmatians like urban merchants. A fanatical Counter-Reformation Catholicism became a component of Sarmatian patriotism.
Sarmatism also repositioned Poland's sense of geography - or of 'geopolitical destiny'. In spite of their Catholic enthusiasm, the neo-Sarmatians looked eastwards rather than westwards. For the 'descendants' of noble barbarians from the Pontic Steppe, the Black Sea coasts and the plains between the Danube and the Don seemed to be their ancestral home and heritage.
In this way, the Sarmatian idea was used to authenticate an aggressive foreign policy towards the East. The word 'Sarmatia' was restored as a description of all Slav populations and their territories. To the Polish nobility, convinced that they were the chosen race, this implied not only that the
szlachta
was the aristocracy of all Slavdom, but that Poland — in a period of almost continuous war against Russians, Tatars and Turks — had an historical claim to old Sarmatian realms in Russia itself, in the Cossack lands of Ukraine, in Moldavia and Bessarabia.
Sarmatism was also a style. It was a way of life: extravagant and ostentatious, sometimes wildly generous and at other times savagely violent and vengeful, based on rural life in wooden
manor-houses and on a cult of the healthy, pious environment of the countryside. Hospitality, which mostly meant drinking and hunting, was a particular Sarmatian pride. Arcadia, however pure, could be boring, and some noble families posted small boys in trees to watch for the dust of an approaching carriage, which would then be virtually ambushed and the stranger dragged indoors to be entertained. His attempts to leave, often weeks later, were sometimes frustrated by removing his coach wheels.
The style was also, and famously, about dress and decoration. Here all the ironies of Sarmatism were concentrated. By the early eighteenth century, the Polish-Sarmatian noble was a startling, unmistakable figure. He shaved his skull, cultivated long, drooping moustaches (the Sarmatism of Lech Walesa's whiskers did wonders for Solidarity in
1980),
and wore a long
kontusz
caftan held in over his paunch by a sash. His sword would be a curved scimitar, its hilt probably encrusted with gold and jewels. In short, he looked like a Turk - or possibly a Turkified Tatar.
Of course, this had nothing to do with what the historical Sarmatians had worn. Reliefs and wall-paintings of the Bosporan Kingdom show the men in trousers and belted tunics, bearded and long-haired. This neo-Sarmatian outfit was actually the clothing of Poland's enemies, the oriental gear of Turk and Tatar warriors appropriated by those who boasted that they were the bastion of Catholic and European Christianity against the pagans. The grandest Sarmatian hero of them all, King John Sobieski, is still honoured as the 'saviour of Christendom'; at the battle of Vienna in
1683,
he relieved the siege of the city and inflicted on the Turkish armies a defeat so crushing that the Ottoman Empire never seriously threatened central Europe again. But at that battle the Polish troops looked so much like the enemy that they were obliged to wear a straw cockade, in case their Habsburg allies mistook them for Turks.
Poland today still insists on its 'European', Western allegiance, now based not only on the Catholic faith but on diligently Western institutions and tastes. On the surface, nothing of that orientalising style remains. And yet in subtle ways Poland is a much more oriental culture than Russia. While the Muscovites hid from the Mongols in their northern forests, the Poles were already open to influences from the Black Sea steppes. The Tatar
quriltai,
as I have suggested, helped to inspire the Polish decision to elect kings by a mass gathering of mounted nobles. The idea of a 'noble democracy' may have nomad origins, like the cloudy beginnings of the Polish
herby
(clans), and the relationship between Polish rulers and urban colonies of foreign merchants — Germans, Scots, Jews, Armenians — was an echo of the symbiosis of Iranians and Greeks by the Black Sea.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Sarmatism collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity. But in its fall, it also destroyed Poland itself, and the independence for which the nobility had fought so fiercely for so many centuries.
It had been obvious for many years that unless the decaying Commonwealth were reformed and modernised, Poland would disintegrate and be annexed by its neighbours. Russia, under Catherine II, already exercised a
de facto
protectorate over Poland, and a first Partition had taken place in
1772.
The last Polish king, Stanislaw August Poniatowski, was a sophisticated European who sought to build a modern state with a strong central authority; the
1791
'Constitution of the Third of May', composed on the most progressive Enlightenment principles, made the monarchy hereditary, reformed the administration and government, and abolished most of the ancient abuses which had allowed the
szlachta
to retain a stranglehold over change. But it was too late.