Rufin Piotrowski

“ No doubt, she could not help feeling with secret bitterness, that liberal Europe takes interest in Italian nationality, in Hungarian nationality, in Moldo-Wallachian nationality, and forgets a little that there was a Polish nationality. But Poland is silent, and she endures this punishment of silence and indifference, which is more difficult to accept than war, more hard to bear than any persecutions; for it has to be borne by a people which has spent its life in seeking for a country, and which has filled the history of to-day with its heroism, its protests, and its distress. ”

“ The French Revolution of February, 1848, was another of those events which, by deceiving Poland, have helped to weigh her down. It was the hour at which a great explosion was expected, for, in a French revolution, how could we do otherwise than see a movement affecting the world? How could we help thinking that all nations would free themselves from old claims, and that Europe would be transformed by democracy? But what, on the contrary, was the result? Everybody knows that this ill-starred revolution availed none of the nationalities. ”

“ On the contrary, Europe cannot but feel an interest in such labours as the emancipation of the serfs, of which the initiative was taken by the Emperor Alexander II., as also in that liberal work which is at present, day by day, evidently pursued in the heart of the Russian nation; but not the less, at the same time, is the eye of Europe upon that black spot at Warsaw. She sees and weighs both faults and misfortunes, and she says to herself, that, if faults have consequences, which follow them inevitably, there is not the less a fixed limit to a people’s misfortunes, and to a nation’s pangs. ”

“ In 1846, after the massacres in Galicia, the Marquis Wiélopolski wrote that ‘Letter to Prince Metternich, by a Polish Gentleman,’ which rang with such fiery eloquence, and which being, as it were, a new revelation, echoed throughout Europe. The author there advised Poland to embrace a resolution of heroic despair—to renounce, for the future, all help from the Western Powers, all deceitful and calculating sympathy, all cheap eloquence, all those guarantees which men have decorated with the pompous title of ‘rights of peoples,’ and then boldly to give herself to Russia. ”

“ The present movement has demonstrated precisely that there is a unity, a fusion of all classes, and that this fusion is sealed by the abolition of the last traces of serfdom, by the definitive acquisition of property by the peasants—a measure which the landlords themselves favoured in a practical and liberal manner; for if, in this agitation, we have seen only its moving and dramatic externals, we must not forget that under all this passion lies a spirit of political sagacity, which is patent, and which has been enlightened by all the faults, and by all the history of the past. ”

“ Alone, and abandoned to her own resources, Poland must evidently succumb; she must sink under the weight of arms, still more under the weight of oppression. Then, surely, the last words had been said, the last resistance conquered, and all was really at an end. On the contrary, nothing was finished; and this is the curious point, the great moral, so to speak, of the events which for the last two months agitate Warsaw and all Polish countries. ”

“ The whole history of Poland is before us, to prove how much violence it costs, how many perpetually recurring struggles it requires, to make the suppression of a whole race a public right, before the fact of its suppression can be forced into the vague and terrible list of ‘things that have been accomplished.’
It is now nearly a century since three Powers, united by the saddest and most dangerous of solidarities, laboured to this end. ”

“ It is a mysterious and dismal land!—a land ‘from which one returns no more,’ as the Polish peasants say, or, as Hamlet speaks of that other region which Siberia so fatally resembles, it is an ‘undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.’ And yet now and then some one does come back. Sometimes at the accession of a Czar to the throne, an amnesty (which, however incomplete it may be, receives no less the surname of general) sends back to heart-broken families some of those who have not wholly succumbed to pain. ”

“ This is the act of life in a people, which, finding itself one day united by one and the sane feeling, spreads itself peaceably through the town, and then demands, what even treaties have not denied to it, respect for its nationality, and its own religion, the guarantee of its existence in regular institutions, the preservation of its own language, the right of interesting itself in its own affairs, of occupying itself in agriculture, in the education of its own children; the right, it a word, to live and to breathe. ”

“ The conviction is deep that they who are once transported to those regions of pain can quit them no more; that Siberia never relinquishes her prey. For nearly a century she has torn from Poland her most devoted women, her most generous sons. Back to those realms of snow and of blood fly the thoughts of every Pole who inquires into the past fortunes of his [Pg 2] family; and when the poet dreams for his country a future which is all liberty and bliss, it is again Siberia which rears herself before his eyes, ready after victory itself still to demand her victims. ”

“ Then Poland, during the last hundred years, has had a legion of poets, all singularly gifted and inspired, and she still possesses a flourishing and varied literature; for her language has remained, although she has not had the freedom of her schools. Is the love of the past and its traditions required? Then that feeling has been both evident and rampant for the last year. Must there be originality of life and manners? Polish manners have preserved all the savour of their nationality, and, most assuredly, have not been influenced by Russia. ”

“ He abides in the sanctuary of human hearts, and every day, every hour, he lives, though buried; grows, though in the tomb!’
This thought of the power of sacrifice, and of passive heroism, has filtered through our youth, and permeated even the masses; and this it is which is visible in the Poland of to-day, for the inspiration of the poet has become the feeling of the people. One other cause, and it is a strange and curious one, has also helped, during the last few years, to spread and to popularise these ideas, by suddenly throwing a new element into Polish society. ”

“ We find a free town, the last remaining image of former independence. We find the name of one common country consecrated by treaty, and resting upon the kingdom newly called into being. We see our right to a nationality made superior to all territorial demarcations. We read, in the first place, of the autonomy of the different provinces that have been dealt out to new masters, and that the map of old Poland is to be adopted and acted upon in material life; and we have a sort of Zollverein of commerce and navigation, serving as the sketch for a confederacy. ”

“ We now come to Austria. As to that power, need I recall with what sinister dexterity she one day succeeded in putting hatred into the hearts of the peasants of Galicia, and in driving them upon the Polish nobility? And is it not a strange irony of fortune which has made Austria the guardian of the tombs of two heroes of Poland? The one is the grave of Sobieski, who sleeps in a church now abandoned and in ruins at Cracow; the other is that of Kosciusko. ”

“ Why should I shun the dangers to which my accomplices were exposed, who neither could nor ought to choose the path of exile? It was therefore a strict duty which I owed to them, and to hundreds of persons who had nothing whatever to do with me, not to be absent when the day of enquiry came. To tell the truth, the Russian plan, in any political search of the kind, is to arrest all those who, from far or near, intimately or casually, may have known the suspected person. ”

“ The public order of 1815 is on the eve of disappearing, and what may be the new order which shall be brought forth by the labours of to-day assuredly no one can tell; but simply because we live at a time in which everything is recast, and re-elaborated, it is our first and best interest to watch the elements of this vast and universal movement, and carefully to consider every serious manifestation of the conscience of the nations. We must notice what dies and what lives. ”

“ After some moments of silence, Prince Bibikov replied, ‘I do not understand why the Poles and the Russians should hate and hurt each other for ever; we are all Slaves, brought together by origin, language, and manners, we ought to be united, and to march on together; and he who thinks otherwise does not understand the true interests of the two nations.’
‘I am quite of your Excellency’s way of thinking, and we indeed have no feeling of ill-will towards the Russian nation; but we aspire to be free, and as regards the government....’
‘I have no time to discuss this with you. ”

“ One thing in these occurrences at Warsaw, interspersed, as they are, with scenes of bloodshed, is very striking, and that is, the passive attitude of a people, which appears unarmed and offers no resistance—which persists, and, though dispersed, constantly reassembles—which offers itself as a defenceless victim, and which refuses the arms which are left within its reach. And under such an attitude, there must be something more than mere obedience to a watchword or to an order. ”

“ No honest, and above all no Christian mind, can fail to appreciate the devotion of these four poor priests. It cannot be too much admired, for it carries them along their ceaseless travels, and supports them as, in their sledges, they journey through the intense cold of Siberia, from Tobolsk to Kamtschatka, and from Nertchinsk to the Polar Sea. The father who visited us in 1845 was a Dominican from Samogitia; but he forbore to wear the gown of his order for fear of outraging the Greek orthodoxy of the natives of Siberia. ”

“ At first, Russia appears to have been visibly surprised at this unexpected manifestation on the part of Poland, in which she believed, perhaps, that no such vitality existed, and she was divided between the inquietude caused by the movement, and by the sense that concessions must be made. She has not the gift of always making the happiest resolutions; she yields when it would be natural to resist, and resists when it would be just to yield. ”

“ Poland was a subject of remorse to Europe, and she inspired respect, without having strength enough to make herself truly and really respected. Hence the strange combinations adopted by the Congress of Vienna, which (while it delivered over the provinces of Poland to Austria, to Russia, and to Prussia) multiplied at the same time protecting guarantees, and laboured to maintain a national link between the different parts, by assuring to them a certain autonomy, as if the future could be secured by abandoning the present. ”

“ One would say that it looks as if Europe, not daring to be wholly just, had wished, at each step, to soften away by equity the violation of the independent existence of a nation; that, practically, she sought to reunite the national tie, which arbitrary right had recently broken; and that she was less occupied in resolving the question of the destinies of Poland, or putting an end to it by one act of sovereign power, than in leaving it in suspense, and handing it over to the future. ”

“ To have escaped from the katorga, to have crossed the Oural Mountains, to have slept for months in the snow in ostiak earths, to have endured so many sufferings and privations, to have leapt the Russian boundary line among the musket balls of soldiers, and now to be taken up by neither more nor less than a Prussian night constable! ”