Every generation contributed new writers, some of whom, such as the novelist Stefan Żeromski (1864-1925), carried the political debate forward, scouring every aspect of life and evaluating everything from the historical past to social institutions, philanthropic initiatives and cooperative ventures. Another, Władysław Reymont (1867-1925), the son of a village organist, was in turn a tailor’s apprentice, a monk, a clerk and several other things before he became a writer and won the Nobel Prize. His
Villages were abandoned, forests were felled, the earth was deprived of its treasures, rivers dried up, people were born—all for that ‘Promised Land’, for that polyp which sucked them in, crushed and chewed up people and things, the sky and the earth, giving in exchange useless millions to a few and hunger and hard work to the masses.
These writers would be followed by waves of others adhering to new literary and stylistic canons. But whatever angle they came at it from, they all contributed to a sustained process of nationbuilding, if only by bringing together and enlarging a thinking readership that spanned not only the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires, but also western Europe, the United States and South America. And this readership could ill afford to waste time on past glories or sophisticated new trends, as the question of what kind of a Polish world they wanted to recreate was taking on real urgency.
What most of them understood by the term ‘Poland’ was the territory of the Commonwealth and the community of peoples it embraced. But while much effort had gone into bringing the other orphan peoples of the Commonwealth into the cause, with some success, as the 1863 insurrection had demonstrated, these were now being drawn in other directions by new national movements.
The Lithuanians were a case in point. They had their own language, their own culture and a long history, but in the thirteenth century their rulers had extended their sway over vast areas of Belorussia and Ukraine to create a Grand Duchy of Lithuania in which the ethnic Lithuanians were a minority. That minority diminished as Lithuanian lords embraced first Russian and then Polish culture: the last grand duke who spoke Lithuanian died in the year Columbus discovered the new world.
A Lithuanian national revival began in the first half of the nineteenth century, and although its supporters made common cause with Polish patriots at first, there was an inherent conflict. The failure of the 1863 insurrection, which demonstrated to them that there was nothing to be gained from alliance with the Poles, marked a parting of the ways. In its search for distinctiveness, Lithuanian nationalism began to define itself against Poland and Polish culture, and particularly against the inclusive culture of the Commonwealth.
It also, perversely, laid claim to the heritage of the whole Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the majority of whose population was Belarusian or Ukrainian, and whose elites were overwhelmingly Polish. This brought it into conflict not only with the Polish inhabitants, but also with the budding Belarusian nationalist movement, which also laid claim to the whole Grand Duchy. The city of Wilno, now Russian Vilna, was a microcosm of the problem: its population was overwhelmingly Polish and only 2 per cent spoke Lithuanian, yet it was claimed, on historical grounds, by the Lithuanians as well as the Belarusians, who brushed aside Polish claims, and ignored the fact that one-third of its population was Jewish.
Similar problems bedeviled the nascent Ukrainian national movement, which was in competition with both Polish and Russian influences, both of which exerted cultural and religious magnetic fields. Its claim to the legacy of Kievan Rus was disputed by Russian nationalists, who dismissed Ukrainian as a dialect of Russian. The majority of the surviving leading families descended from Kievan times had associated with Poland centuries before, depriving the national movement of its natural leaders.
The birth of modern Ukrainian nationalism was also marked by a visceral anti-Semitism whose roots can be traced to the end of the sixteenth century, when large numbers of Jews settled in the area, mainly as agents of Polish estates, innkeepers and traders. This would be compounded in the last decade of the nineteenth century by manipulation on the part of tsarist authorities eager to channel Ukrainian energies into anti-Semitic pogroms.