Where Is Poland? | New society

Chapter 7

New society

The partitions altered the structure of society. For political and economic reasons, the nobility lost their privileges. Impoverished nobles, together with the bourgeoisie (often of foreign origin), eventually helped form a new class of society, called the intelligentsia.

Burghers: Karol Beyer, Jakub Piotrowski and Ksawery Szlenkier, Warsaw, 1862. Photo: Polona.pl

New converts to Polishness

The bourgeoisie were a social group traditionally poorly represented in Poland, very often recruited from among foreigners. It is therefore all the more intriguing that foreigners living in the Polish lands under partition – serving as officials in the foreign administrations or as professionals of diverse kinds – became assimilated quite quickly: despite the unfavourable circumstances (overt pressure encouraging Russification or Germanization, and administrative harassment) they often chose to embrace the culture of the politically persecuted Poles. Frequently, in the second generation they would often become very fervent Poles. Indeed, to stretch such religious terminology a little further, we might even say they became zealous neophytes of Polishness.

Note that it was none other than the descendants of recently-foreign families that in the nineteenth century wrote dictionaries of the Polish language (S.B. Linde), painted Polish history (Matejko, Grottger, Gerson), explained the history of the nation (Lelewel, Bandtkie), preserved Polish folklore (Kolberg), photographed Polish life (Beyer, Brandel) and variously revendicated the Polish identity (Wojciech Kętrzyński vel Adalbert von Winkler).

For many assimilating foreigners, being Polish was not just a choice of identity but a moral imperative and a profession of faith in the religion of liberty, meant to come to fruition one day in the rebirth of the Polish state. This process of voluntary assimilation, with varying degrees of advancement, continued throughout the whole century, while essentially remaining limited to the strata of the nobility and bourgeoisie. Paradoxically, it became more intense in periods when Polishness was most under threat.

Stefan Żeromski with his friends in Zakopane, 1916

Intellectual class

The ‘intelligentsia’ is a particular social group that emerged in nineteenth century in certain societies of Eastern Europe, especially Polish and Russian societies. The word itself seems to have been first coined by Karol Libelt, writing in Polish in 1844 – significantly earlier than the Russian term, which later gained international prominence.

In Poland, given the absence of any historical societal group endowed with social capital, members of the intelligentsia came above all from among young people of noble background. These were the sons and daughters of noble families whom the post-uprising repressions had deprived of their means of subsistence. They were therefore well-educated, but in the realities of the partitioned Polish lands had little prospect for gainful employment. Naturally the intelligentsia class came to be further supplemented by people hailing from other social strata: the bourgeoisie and the peasantry.

As a class, the intelligentsia was characterized by a strong commitment to the struggle for progress, which for its members became a kind of mission. Representatives of the intelligentsia made their goal the liberation of the people from political and economic oppression.

At the same time, the Polish intelligentsia was significantly different from the Russian intelligentsia. As Andrzej Walicki writes, while ‘in both countries membership in the intelligentsia had an ethical component, requiring conscious commitment to public welfare. In Poland, however, this commitment was identified, as a rule, with national patriotism, whereas in Russia it necessarily involved social radicalism and political opposition'.

Thus, Walicki argues, ‘a Polish “intellectual” could be a moderate, or even a conservative, deeply religious, attached to national traditions and horrified by the manifestations of Russian “nihilism”’.