Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (84 page)

For obvious reasons, historians rose to special prominence. Everyone wanted to know how the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been destroyed, and why Galicia had been created. The Stánczyk Group of historians in Kraków – so named after a mordant royal jester – held that the Polish nation had no one to blame for its misfortunes but itself. Count-Professor Stanisław Tarnowski (1837–1917) was a central figure in the group.
³⁸
Alexander Brückner (1856–1939), professor of Slavic History and Philology at Berlin, was also, despite his name, a Galician Pole.
³⁹
Professor Szymon Azkenazy (1866–1935), a specialist in diplomatic history, contested the Stánczyks’ ‘pessimism’.
⁴⁰
It was entirely fitting that one of the last governors of Galicia, Professor Michał Bobrzyński (1849–1935), was a popular Cracovian medievalist.

Yet no one was more influential in the long run than Mikhail Hrushevsky (1866–1934), the founding father of Ukrainian history. Though employed in St Petersburg, Hrushevsky could only publish freely in Lemberg, and his
Traditional Scheme of Russian History
(1904) demolished the widespread Russocentric myth that Moscow and its successors had been the sole legitimate heirs of Kievan Rus’.
⁴¹
Meir Bałaban (1877–1942), a graduate of Lemberg, wrote a series of groundbreaking works on the Jews of Kraków, Lemberg and Lublin, thereby earning the reputation as the pioneer of modern Polish-Jewish history.
⁴²

Literature, too, blossomed in Galicia, partly because many foreign writers chose to live there. Thanks to the rise of national languages, Polish, Ruthenian and Jewish letters flourished in parallel. Among Galicia’s native sons, the poet Wincenty Pol (1807–72), offspring of an Austrian family in New Galicia, took brilliantly to the local Polish idiom.
⁴³
Count Alexander Fredro (1793–1876), whose estate lay at Surochów near Jarosław, is best characterized as the father of Galician comedy.
⁴⁴
Kazimierz Tetmayer (1865–1940) was the principal promoter of the ‘Tatra Legend’ and of associated regional culture, and the patron of Zakopane as a literary centre.
⁴⁵
Elements of the legend included a romantic cult of the high mountains, tales of freedom-loving heroes (especially of Janosik, the ‘Robin Hood’ of the Tatras), and a movement for stylized regional architecture and design.

An eclectic group of artists and writers calling themselves
Młoda Polska
, ‘Young Poland’, made their name around the turn of the century. By far the most significant figure among them was the Cracovian Stanisław Wyspiański (1869–1907) – poet, dramatist, painter, architect, designer and professor of Fine Arts. His play
Wesele
(1901), ‘The Wedding Feast’, bristling both with historical references and contemporary issues, is a dramatic masterpiece.
⁴⁶
Wesele
was inspired by a real event – the marriage in the village of Bronowice near Kraków of a young university lecturer and a peasant girl. The Cracovian snobs no doubt viewed the event as a social
mésalliance
. But Wyspiański saw it as an allegory of reconciliation leading to national unity. In the play’s final scene, a little girl is brought forward and asked to put her hand on her heart: ‘Something is throbbing,’ she says.

— ‘And do you know what it is?’

— ‘It’s my heart.’

— ‘Yes, and that’s what Poland is!’
⁴⁷

Wyspiański would be counted among the highest pantheon of Polish writers.

Among the many exiles who moved to Galicia, Jan Kasprowicz (1860–1926) won perhaps the greatest reputation. The child of illiterate parents, he had fled Prussia, but so educated himself that he translated Dante, Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky into Polish. He worked for thirty years in Lemberg, before retiring to his
Harenda
at Poronin near Zakopane.
⁴⁸

The Ruthenian literary movement, which started virtually from scratch in the 1830s, had a multitude of obstacles to overcome. The
Rusalka Dnistrovaia
, the very first joint publication of three writers calling themselves the ‘Ruthenian Triad’, was composed in Lemberg in 1837, but for fear of the state censorship was published in Budapest;
⁴⁹
it was not until 1848 that activists were successful in asserting the right of Ruthenian/Ukrainian to be officially regarded as a distinct language. Henceforth, the ‘Ukrainian Awakening’ would proceed in parallel in Austrian Galicia and in Russian-ruled Ukraine. Its most important member, Ivan Franko (1856–1916), enjoyed little esteem during his lifetime. He was the orphaned son of a blacksmith from a village near Drohobych, an active non-Marxist socialist, a powerful prose writer, and an academic. After his death, he came to be seen alongside the poet Taras Shevchenko as one of the fathers of modern Ukrainian literature; the university from which he was expelled would later be given his name. In Galician times he made a major contribution to the cultural advance of his national community by translating the classics of European literature, including works by Dante, Shakespeare, Byron, Hugo and Goethe.
⁵⁰

Vasyl Stefanyk (1871–1936) was an accomplished writer of Ruthenian short stories. Born in Pokutia, East Galicia, he studied medicine in Kraków and became acquainted with members of the
Młoda Polska
group. His chosen theme was the travails of emigration. One of the stories, ‘
Kaminnyi Khrest
’, ‘The Stone Cross’ (1900), was turned into an early film; a monument to its real-life hero, who died in Canada in 1911, was raised in Hilliard, Alberta.
⁵¹

Galicians often used German as a literary medium, either because they had gone off to study in Austria or because they sought to address a wider European public. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–95) fitted both criteria. He was the son of the police director of Lemberg, and was not a native German-speaker. But on returning from studies in Graz he made his name in the 1860s as a writer of short stories inspired by Polish, Jewish and Ruthenian folklore. His trademark work, however,
Venus in Pelz
(‘Venus in Furs’, 1869), explored his sexual proclivities, and gave rise to the psychiatric term ‘masochism’.
⁵²

Jewish writers plied their craft in German, Polish, Yiddish or Hebrew according to circumstance. The leading literary critic Wilhelm Feldman (1866–1919), for example, born in Zbaraz˙, educated in Berlin and resident in Kraków, mainly chose Polish.
⁵³
Mordechai Gebirtig (1877–1942), poet and song-writer, is celebrated as Kraków’s ‘Last Yiddish Bard’. His song, ‘
S’ Brent
’, ‘Our little town is burning’, has become a Jewish standard. His ‘Farewell to Kraków’ can be taken as a lament for the lost world of Galician Jewry:

Blayb gezunt mir, Kroke!

Blayb zhe mir gezunt
.

S’vart di fur geshpant shayn fur mayn hoyz

S’traybt der wild soyne
,

Vi m’traybt a hunt
,

Mit akhzoriyes mikh fun dir aroys
.

(‘Farewell for me, my Kraków! / Farewell, my country. / The harnessed cart is waiting outside. / The wild enemy / is driving me out like a dog / to destinies unknown.’)
⁵⁴

Sooner or later, all attempts to describe Galicia’s qualities and characteristics reach the subject of humour. Galicians tended to be both sardonic – since they had little faith in their ability to change anything – and, as a way of softening the blow, addicted to jokes. A famous story, told by Galicians about the Galician Front in 1914, says it all. A German officer reports: ‘The situation is serious, but not hopeless.’ An Austrian officer retorts: ‘No, it’s hopeless, but not serious.’

Many of the jokes centred on the long-lived Emperor Franz-Joseph. In the winter of 1851, when he visited the Jagiellonian University, the professors were told that they must stand when the emperor was standing, and sit when the emperor was seated. Outside the venerated
Collegium Maius
, the emperor slipped on the icy cobblestones and fell flat on his face. All the professors immediately flung themselves headlong onto the ice. On another occasion, the emperor lost his way when hunting in the mountains, taking refuge after nightfall in a remote tavern. The emperor knocks on the bolted door. ‘Who’s there?’ the innkeeper calls. ‘We are,’ comes the reply. ‘And who, for God’s sake, are
We
?’ ‘We, by God’s Grace,’ the visitor recites, ‘are His Royal and Imperial Majesty, the Apostolic King of Jerusalem, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Galicia and Lodomeria…’ ‘In that case,’ the innkeeper relents, ‘come in, but by God’s grace, will We please wipe Our boots.’

True to his ascetic lifestyle, whereby he wore the same old army jacket for decades, Franz-Joseph was said to allow himself only one mistress. Anna Nakowska, wife of a Galician railway official, claimed to have made numerous discreet visits to the Hofburg in the 1870s. She reportedly benefited from discounted railway fares, and her husband from regular promotions. But she was not alone, being superseded in the emperor’s affections by his long-term companion, the actress Katharina Schratt. In 1880, during the emperor’s second visit to Galicia, the station at Bochnia was decorated with a banner bearing the imperial motto, ‘
Viribus Unitis
’. The workmen responsible did not notice that the banner was hanging directly over the station conveniences. The combined message read: ‘Strength in Union: Ladies and Gentlemen’.

In 1915 an Austrian officer of Polish descent was overheard deriding his emperor as a ‘
stary pierdola
’. In the ensuing court martial, three professors of the Jagiellonian University solemnly testified that the offending expression could indeed be construed as ‘Old Fart’. On the other hand, they asserted, it was also an archaic form of endearment meaning ‘Fine elderly gentleman’. About the same time, a Russian revolutionary was stopped on the frontier. A police officer asks him: ‘For what purpose do you intend to visit Galicia?’ ‘My purpose is to support the international struggle of the Working Class against Capitalism!’ ‘In that case,’ says the officer, ‘since no one here does much work, and we don’t have any money, please come in.’

Jokes and gossip are excellent subjects for dividing historians. The purists say, correctly, that they cannot be verified. The realists maintain, with equal correctness, that they provide vital insights into the tenor of everyday life.
⁵⁵

For the first century of its existence, Galicia’s government was entirely centralized. The emperor and his ministers in Vienna ruled through governors resident in Lemberg. Politics, such as it was, consisted of delivering petitions to the governor, or, for influential aristocrats, of seeking the emperor’s ear at court. From 1772 to 1848, every single name on the list of governors or ‘governors-general’ – eighteen in total, from Graf Anton von Pergen to Freiherr Wilhelm von Hammerstein – was an Austrian German.

In 1848, during the ‘Springtime of Nations’, Galicia played a minor part in the Europe-wide disturbances, and Galician delegates attended the Slav Congress in Prague. The Congress assisted in the recognition of Ukrainian identity despite Russian protests, while discovering that the Poles and pan-Slavism do not mix. Little could be achieved beyond the talking. Imperial forces were on hand to bombard first Lemberg and then Kraków into obedience.
⁵⁶
Nonetheless, the consequences were far-reaching. A lively Galician delegation had lobbied the emperor in Vienna for the abolition of serfdom, and at home a rash of political organizations formed to channel the growing demands for representation. A strong body of the emperor’s Galician advisers were convinced that constitutional reform was unavoidable. Among them was Count Agenor Gołuchowski, a native Galician who went on to serve several terms as governor from the 1850s to the 1870s.

Two new organizations with lasting influence were both Ruthenian in orientation. The Supreme Ruthenian Council (
Holovna Ruska Rada
, HRR) set out not just to gain influence with the Austrian government, but also to prevent the Poles from gaining a monopoly on language and educational issues. It rapidly mobilized a network of local councils, which were to be the foundation of the future Ruthenian/Ukrainian movement. The Ruthenian Congress (
Ruskyi Sobor
), in contrast, was set up by conservative landowners in order to counter the HRR’s more radical aspirations. Between them, these two organizations would ensure that the Galician Poles would not henceforth have everything their own way.