Poland полностью

The next generation of political writers applied their ideas to specific institutions. Bartlomiej Paprocki’s O Hetmanie was an attempt to define the role and duty of the hetman; Krzysztof Warszewicki’s De Legato did the same for those engaged in diplomacy; Jakub Górski’s Rada Pańska, Jan Zamoyski’s De Senatu Romano and Wawrzyniec Goślicki’s De Optimo Senatore all lectured on the conduct of affairs of state. Although they were more practical than their forerunners they still clung to the belief that good government depended on good people rather than on strong institutions. As Zamoyski said in the speech inaugurating the university he had founded: ‘Republics will always be as good as the upbringing of their young men.’

By the end of the fifteenth century over 80 per cent of the 6,000 parishes in Wielkopolska and Małopolska had schools. The resultant upsurge in literacy was no doubt responsible for a literary flowering which took place at the same time. The first Polish lyric poet, Klemens Janicki (1516-43), was born a peasant but entered the priesthood and studied at the universities of Bologna and Padua, where he was crowned poet laureate by Cardinal Bembo. More typical was Mikołaj Rej of Nagłowice (1505-69), a country gentleman who wrote in robust Polish on religious, political and social issues. He was one of half a dozen notable poets, but they were all overshadowed by one figure who dominated the second half of the century.

Jan Kochanowski (1530-84) studied at Kraków, Königsberg and Padua, and then spent some years at court while considering a career in the Church. He was prolific and imaginative, and his use of Polish, a language he did more than any other to enrich, was masterful and refined. While he is best known for his lyrical verse and court poems, his rendering of the psalms of David, and above all the threnody he composed on the death of his three-year-old daughter, Kochanowski did not avoid the political subjects popular with other writers. He too was preoccupied with the good of the Commonwealth. This comes out strongly in his only attempt at drama. Although there was dramatic entertainment at court from the 1520s and a number of troupes active around the country (and, from 1610, a playhouse in Gdańsk in which English actors performed Shakespeare), it was not a favoured medium. Kochanowski’s short play The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys is the only exception. The characters in the play are not really people, but in effect the voices of collective interests, and the play is not about their feelings, but about the fate of Troy. This curious use of dramatis personae to represent the collective foreshadows nineteenth—and twentieth-century Polish drama, the mainstream of which is neither lyrical nor psychological, but ethical and political.

The state of mind defined in the words of these writers is a curious mixture of ideological bombast, emotional sincerity and healthy cynicism. The three co-exist with the two most pervasive themes. One is the almost obsessive feeling of responsibility for and compulsion to participate in the organic life of the Commonwealth at every level. The other is the quest for Arcadia. If political writing rested on the myth of an ‘ideal condition’ which had been perverted and must be restored, the literary imagination translated this into a quest for the state of innocence as epitomised by country life. This gave rise to a long tradition of Sielanki, a word the poet Szymon Szymonowicz (1558-1629) coined to express bucolic idylls. The sielanka theme haunted Polish thought and literature, sometimes assuming the aspect of a cult. Inspired by the quest for a lost innocence, which implied a rejection of corruption, it could take many forms. In the minds of the nineteenth-century Romantics, for instance, it would become confused with the quest for the lost motherland, and imply a rejection of political reality. More often, it took the form of intellectual withdrawal from the world, which at its worst exalted intellectual escapism and made the spirit of enquiry suspect.

There is a strong, if indefinable, connection between these states of mind and Poland’s place in European culture. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Poles were as widely travelled as the citizens of any nation. Polish and foreign painters, sculptors and musicians likened Polish cities and palaces to those of Europe. Kochanowski knew Ronsard, Stanisław Reszka and others were friends of Tasso, and a considerable number of Poles were closely associated with Erasmus of Rotterdam. Leonard Coxe, who taught at Cambridge and the Sorbonne before becoming professor at the Jagiellon University, remarked in a letter to an English friend that the Poles walked, talked, ate and slept Erasmus, beginning with the King, who wrote to him in a familiar style usually reserved for sovereign princes.