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Dynastic Conservatism and Poetic Violence
in Fin-de-Siècle Cracow: The Habsburg Matrix of
Polish Modernism



LARRY WOLFF




Ever since the publication in the American Historical Review in the summer of 1961, forty years ago, of Carl Schorske's pioneering article, "Politics and the Psyche in fin-de-siècle Vienna," there has been little doubt among historians that Viennese intellectual and artistic concerns were of fundamental significance for the cultural developments of the twentieth century in Europe. The public fascination with fin-de-siècle Vienna has even gone beyond the boundaries of academic scholarship, culminating in blockbuster museum exhibits such as "Vienna 1900" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1986 or, that same year, "Vienne: Naissance d'un Siècle" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In a recent book of essays on Vienna and Budapest, published in 1998, the Hungarian historian Péter Hanák has noted "Vienna's extraordinary present-day popularity," observing that "Vienna's brilliance long obscured the virtues and merits of its neighbors" and making a case in the book for the parallel importance of Budapest. 1 Indeed, it appears remarkable that, over the course of a generation, the historiographical ascendancy of fin-de-siècle Vienna has not resulted in more purposeful efforts to place the urban culture of the capital in the context of a more broadly conceived fin-de-siècle Habsburg monarchy, whose multiple, multinational centers might include not only Vienna and Budapest but also Prague, Trieste, Zagreb, L'viv, and Cracow, among others. The case of Cracow provides a crucial piece of the Habsburg cultural puzzle, with artistic and intellectual developments that both converged and contrasted with those of the contemporary Viennese scene. 1
     In Polish historiography and literary history, fin-de-siècle Cracow has been most often treated in the national context of
Mloda Polska
, or Young Poland, linking Cracovian concerns with those in other specifically Polish centers, especially Warsaw within the Russian empire. 2 For instance, when in the midst of the Solidarity revolution, in June 1981, there took place in Cracow an academic conference on "Cracow at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century," the papers posed such national questions as "whether Cracow was the capital of Mloda Polska," and "whether Cracow at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century was the Polish Rome." 3 Such questions are meaningful and important, looking to the common aspects of national culture in the partitioned lands of Poland but tending to obscure the Habsburg correspondences that also conditioned intellectual life in Cracow. The historical revaluation of fin-de-siècle Cracow should also consider the city in relation to contemporary Vienna and thus in the context of the fin-de-siècle Habsburg monarchy.
2
     The designation Mloda Polska, analogous in name to the literary circle of Jung-Wien in the Habsburg capital, suggests that fin-de-siècle Cracow, like Vienna, may be considered as a question of cultural generational conflict. Schorske has analyzed, almost psychoanalyzed, the Viennese complex, in which "the new culture-makers in the city of Freud thus repeatedly defined themselves in terms of a kind of collective oedipal revolt," rebelling "against the authority of the paternal culture that was their inheritance," against "the value system of classical liberalism-in-ascendancy." 4 The culture-makers in contemporary Cracow also formed, both chronologically and self-consciously, a generational cohort; they were swayed by the charismatic "Satanic" leadership of Stanislaw Przybyszewski, born in 1868, were attuned to the decadent and melancholy verses of Kazimierz Tetmajer, born in 1865, were amazed at the revolutionary dramatic conceptions of Stanislaw Wyspianski, born in 1869, and were amused at the cabaret songs of the slightly younger Tadeusz Zelenski, nicknamed "Boy" and born in 1874. These writers themselves had a powerful conviction of their own generational achievement in fin-de-siècle Cracow, and later memorialized it with their own pens in Przybyszewski's Moi Wspólczesni (My Contemporaries) in 1930 and Boy's Znaszli ten kraj? (Do You Know the Land?) in 1931. 3
     Yet the model of generational revolt against ascendant liberalism, which Schorske has proposed for the case of Vienna, should perhaps be revised in the case of Cracow to take into account the hegemonic conservatism of the city, where clerical and aristocratic values had prevailed during the second half of the nineteenth century. The intellectual revolt of the turn of the century in Cracow pitted itself not against the vulnerable paternal ideals of liberalism in retreat but rather against a conservative traditionalism that had not yet seriously encountered the social, economic, and ideological challenges of bourgeois liberalism. Boy, comparing it to Paris, conceived of fin-de-siècle Cracow as half a modern city, merely the "left bank" of the Vistula, with plenty of students and professors, disporting themselves in cafés and cabarets, but without the ballast of a "right bank" for modern commerce and capitalism. 5 The imbalance of bohemianism and business created the conditions for precocious cultural modernism without advanced economic modernity. Paris may have been, in Walter Benjamin's famous phrase, "the capital of the nineteenth century," its urban landscape provoking the modern poetic vision of Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, while Walt Whitman's New York, George Gissing's London, Arthur Schnitzler's Vienna, and Andrey Bely's St. Petersburg were likewise culturally compelling, whether by stupendous population, glittering consumption, gargantuan construction, or the monumental manifestations of far-flung imperial power. 6 Cracow, with 70,000 inhabitants in 1890 and 85,000 in 1900, was a modest city of increasing size, whose cultural rebels were well aware that artistic modernism, elsewhere, nourished itself on the unprecedented idiosyncracies of the true metropolis. 7 4
     The modernist uprising of a younger generation against conservatism in Cracow, like the "revolt" against liberalism in Vienna, should not be interpreted as absolutely oppositional in nature, inasmuch as the generations were inevitably bound together in intimate relation. The oedipally rebellious sons deployed the paternal legacy and depended on the elder patronage of established institutions and an ambivalent public. The younger generation had no alternative but to seek the sympathy and support of the older generation, which, in conservative Cracow as in liberal Vienna, was already inclined to take an interest in literary and artistic developments. Schorske has argued that, in Vienna, art became for the bourgeoisie "an escape, a refuge from the unpleasant world of increasingly threatening political reality." 8 In Cracow, correspondingly, culture became in the nineteenth century the alternative or escape for a conservative Polish aristocracy that preferred to forgo the dangers of insurrectionary national politics; at the same time, culture could serve to disguise or defuse the political implications of a deeply impoverished peasant population in Galicia and intense national and religious tensions among Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians (or Ruthenians) in the province. Just as the preeminent organ of hegemonic liberal culture in Vienna was the daily Neue Freie Presse, so the prevailing voice of conservatism in Cracow was the newspaper Czas (Time). Boy remembered "the venerable daily Czas, the aristocratic, conservative, and clerical organ," with its pervasive influence on the public: "'Czas writes,' 'Czas says,' these were words that rang in my ears from my earliest childhood." In the 1890s, Czas continued to dominate a small field of daily rivals, such as the liberal Nowa Reforma (New Reform) and the nationalist, outspokenly anti-Semitic upstart Glos Narodu (Voice of the Nation). 9 With its populist impulse, Glos Narodu was particularly inclined to polemicize contemptuously against Czas. 5
     According to Boy, who was writing songs at the turn of the century for the cabaret "Zielony Balonik" (The Green Balloon), the culture of fin-de-siècle Cracow flourished in the context of "a strange symbiosis between Czas and the Green Balloon, a discreet but very real symbiosis." 10 In Vienna, the Neue Freie Presse soon embraced Jung-Wien, applauding and even publishing the work of such writers as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler. In Cracow, the clerical, conservative Czas, though understandably apprehensive of Przybyszewski's self-proclaimed Satanism, published the poetry of Tetmajer and Wyspianski and, finally, in 1901, after three days of hesitating silence, gave an enthusiastic review to the premiere of Wyspianski's dramatic masterpiece, Wesele (The Wedding). The notion of "symbiosis," as formulated by Boy, suggests that Czas itself may provide an important perspective for evaluating fin-de-siècle Cracow, as the newspaper registered, reflected, revised, and reviewed the values of the younger generation within the city, as well as broader currents from elsewhere in the Habsburg monarchy and the rest of Europe. Retrospectively reading Czas, as Czas itself was once read by its Cracow public, and as the paper in turn interpretively "read" the city, the historian may seek to analyze the correspondences between the textual artifacts of urban journalism and the literary products of fin-de-siècle culture, at a time when city and culture alike were ambivalently located in nationally Polish and imperially Habsburg contexts. 11 6
     The note of fin-de-siècle decadence was already sounded in 1894, in Tetmajer's poem "Koniec wieku XIX" (The End of the Nineteenth Century). The poet could not satisfy his spirit in prayers, in resignation, through faith in a future life, or even by indulgence in sensuous pleasures: "So what is there? What remains for us who know everything, for whom none of the old beliefs is enough? / What is your shield against the spear of evil, man of the end of the century?" 12 Such questions pointed toward the inebriated enthusiastic nihilism of Przybyszewski, who returned to Poland in 1898 after many years abroad, settled in Cracow, took up the editorship of the journal Zycie (Life), and promptly revolutionized the cultural climate of the city. From the moment of his arrival, the younger generation found its rallying point in his outrageous and charismatic leadership. The year 1898 was also a watershed for Cracow conservatism. It was a year in which Czas anticipated the decorous and solemn celebration of two significant semi-centennials, the fiftieth anniversary jubilee of the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph and also the same anniversary of the newspaper's own journalistic existence, established in 1848. Yet both of those important conservative occasions were suddenly undercut and overshadowed by an unanticipated Habsburg disaster, the anarchist assassination of Empress Elisabeth in September 1898. This immediately became the occasion for Czas to reformulate and consolidate the ideological stance of conservatism, with almost apocalyptic fervor, looking toward the century's end. The assassination called forth an affirmation of dynastic loyalism in Cracow and gave sensational substance to a conservative vision of cosmic struggle against the ideological monsters of Satanism, revolution, and anarchy. At the same time, the perspective of conservatism was already inflected with elements of fin-de-siècle decadence, so that even a conservative organ like Czas could not fail to appreciate the tremendous dramatic impact of anarchist violence, to recognize the poetic aspects of the life and death of the empress. Transfixed by the anarchist act of violence, the city was distracted from other, more mundane, acts of violence that expressed the social, economic, national, and religious tensions of contemporary Galicia. The assassination of the empress and the character of its reception in the city demonstrated that an imperial Habsburg sensation could become an occasion for transformative municipal self-fashioning and, at the same time, revealed the artistic reverberations of violence within the culture of fin-de-siècle Cracow. 7


In a special edition of Czas on September 11, 1898, the editor, Michal Chylinski, reported to his readers the news, received from Vienna by telephone, of the assassination of Elisabeth (Elzbieta in Polish) on September 10 by the shores of Lake Geneva. "The horrifying news about the tragic death of the empress," he noted, "calls forth from all circles of society the most painful impressions and deepest sympathy for the monarch hurt by such a heavy blow." Thus, from the very first announcement of the news in Cracow, the story of the assassination was invested with the dual significance of rallying sympathy and support to the Habsburg dynasty and forging a sort of sentimental solidarity among different "circles of society." On September 13, Czas elaborated on these themes: 8

The crime commited in Geneva shocks the whole world with aversion and repugnance, calls forth curses in the entire monarchy, and intensifies the feeling of filial loyalty and attachment, when for the lonely monarch the peoples under the Habsburg scepter remain his nearest family. Such feelings have taken hold deeply in every level of the population in our society and country. Some years ago there flashed for us for a moment the hope of greeting the enchanting empress, who everywhere spread grace and charm. A concurrence of contraries deprived us of the possibility of paying homage to her in our land, and this regret increases the mourning of our country. 13

The assassination immediately became an occasion for affirming the solidarity of "every level of the population in our society and country" and, at the same time, "the peoples under the Habsburg scepter." The references to "our country" could hardly have meant Poland, which did not exist in 1898, and whose partitioned lands were divided among three different dynasties, but rather referred to Galicia, the provincial entity of Habsburg Poland. Galicia was created at the time of the first partition of Poland in 1772, when Empress Maria Theresa needed a name to designate the Polish territory she had reluctantly acquired for the sake of preserving the balance of power. Cracow was first included in the province after the third partition of 1795, then adhered to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw under Napoleonic auspices, and, after the Congress of Vienna, it emerged as a nominally independent city state. The city was definitively reincorporated into Habsburg Galicia after 1846, a traumatic year in the history of the province that still cast a shadow at the end of the nineteenth century. In that year, a Polish national insurrection was launched in the free city of Cracow, with an appeal in the name of independence to the province of Galicia. Some Habsburg officials sponsored a counter-appeal to the peasantry of the province, urging loyalty to the emperor and resistance to the insurrectionary Polish szlachta, the gentry; the unexpectedly ferocious response was a peasant uprising against the gentry, culminating in the massacre of more than a thousand people in the region around the town of Tarnów. The lesson that the gentry learned was that the Polish peasants were not susceptible to the insurrectionary cause of Polish nationalism and actually preferred to cast their lot with the Habsburg dynasty; many nobles in Galicia came to the conclusion that they should do likewise. After 1866, when the Habsburgs were defeated by Otto von Bismarck at Königgrätz, and were vulnerable to national pressure from within the monarchy, the nobles of Galicia strategically affirmed their attachment to the Habsburgs, and the provincial assembly in L'viv adopted a declaration of eloquent loyalty to Franz Joseph: "Przy Tobie, Najjasniejszy Panie, stoimy i stac chcemy," "We stand with you, Your Majesty, and wish to stand with you." Galicia emerged from the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 with autonomous privileges of its own, self-government by the diet or Sejm at L'viv, and important concessions to the Polish language in administration and education. 14  
     L'viv was the provincial capital, but Cracow, with Jagiellonian University, became the intellectual and ideological center of triumphant conservatism in Galicia, articulated for the public in the pages of Czas. The gentry of Poland, at the time of the partitions, were among the most relatively numerous nobilities in Europe, counting perhaps 8 percent of the population; in little nineteenth-century Cracow, they played an unusually influential urban role, enhanced by the Habsburg penchant for curial election structures on municipal, provincial, and imperial levels. The importance of the gentry in Cracow was increasingly supplemented by that of the university professors, who could often be characterized by noble descent or, more vaguely, by noble values. There was a well-known anecdote about a beggar who solicited a coin from a gentleman, addressing him as "count" (panie hrabio); when he denied being a count, the beggar immediately altered the salutation to "professor" (panie profesorze). 15 The powerfully influential figure of Count Stanislaw Tarnowski combined both qualities as professor of literature at the university, president of the Cracow Academy, and one of the creators of Cracow's conservative "Stanczyk" ideology, named for a sixteenth-century court jester. 9
     Conservatism achieved political power in Cracow after 1867, just when liberalism arrived at its moment of supremacy in Vienna; by the final decade of the century, those hegemonies were threatened by the same social and ideological rumblings of modern mass politics. Precisely because of Galicia's autonomy and relatively relaxed Habsburg circumstances, Polish political movements found more opportunities for development than in Russian or Prussian Poland; in 1892, a social democratic party was established in Galicia, in 1893 a peasant party. In 1893, the Cracow municipal council chose the bookseller Józef Friedlein as its president over Count Antoni Wodzicki; Friedlein introduced electric streetcars to the city. In 1893, Glos Narodu first appeared in Cracow, encouraging anti-Semitism and even commercial boycott against the Jews who made up 30 percent of the city's population, and in 1895 Roman Dmowski began to publish in Galicia the journal Przeglad Wszechpolski (All-Polish Observer), mobilizing middle-class integral nationalist sentiment. 16 In 1894, the appointment of Mykhailo Hrushevsky as a history professor in L'viv consolidated the increasing importance of Ukrainian national identity in eastern Galicia. In 1897, the extended Habsburg franchise brought Ignacy Daszynski, the Galician socialist leader, into the Viennese Reichsrat, shattering the conservative consensus of the "Polish Club," while the elections in eastern Galicia witnessed new levels of tension between Poles and Ukrainians. Whereas in 1846 it was the dynastically loyal peasants who murdered the nationally discontented nobles, in 1898, when Elisabeth was assassinated, it was the loyal conservative nobles who sought to rally the dynastic sentiments of the increasingly discontented lower levels of society. In Czas, the declaration of "filial loyalty and attachment" to Franz Joseph in 1898 echoed the famous formula of 1866—"we stand with you"—putting a newly urgent emphasis on the inclusiveness of the first-person plural. 10
     As the newspaper could not conceal, Elisabeth had never managed to make a visit to Cracow, and "the hope of greeting the charming empress," of "paying homage to her in our land," was never to be fulfilled. Elisabeth had not been without passionate attachments to particular peoples of the monarchy, most notably the Hungarians, but the ardor for her, articulated in Cracow after the assassination, was apparently platonic in character, a matter of purely ideological devotion, unassisted by any memories of personal contact in the imperial flesh. Now, in the aftermath of martyrdom, the empress was everywhere in Cracow: "On account of the death of Her Majesty our city has gone into mourning clothes. From the churches, from every municipal and official building, as well as from public institutions there wave the flags of mourning." Shops and businesses were closed in her honor, and theater performances were canceled. Mourning for the empress was supposed to include the entire city, affecting all its public activities, just as it was meant to embrace every social stratum. While schools organized special services to promote mourning among the young, there were placards around the city announcing a Mass to be sponsored by Catholic workers' societies. The bishop of Cracow, Jan Puzyna, issued a statement deploring the assassination as "the sad fruit of estrangement from God and the Church, which unfortunately we see in our times," and offering the emperor that sympathy which "with deep suffering strikes the hearts of all his subjects." Not only the head of the urban ecclesiastical hierarchy but also the leaders of its intellectual institutions became spokesmen for municipal condolences, with Wladyslaw Knapinski, the rector of Jagiellonian University, and Tarnowski, the president of the Cracow Academy, sending telegrams of sympathy for the emperor to Vienna and promptly receiving in return official telegrams of gracious acknowledgment. "His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty thanks you kindly for the expressions of sympathy," read the telegram to Tarnowski, and the whole city read it in the newspaper along with him. 17 Czas sought to represent in its pages the universality of municipal mourning, which embraced the clergy, the professors, the students, and the workers. Glos Narodu offered its readers a somewhat more divisive view of their city, describing public announcements posted Sunday morning after the assassination on Saturday, with groups of "poorer people" already gathered to read the news at six, "going to church or the morning markets," while intellectuals, officers, and middle-class people were not seen reading the posters until seven. Nevertheless, Glos Narodu conceded that "the whole city was in a true fever." 18 11



 
 
 


Figure 1 : This picture of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth dates from shortly before the "catastrophe of Geneva," that is, the assassination of Elisabeth in September 1898. From A. de Burgh, Elisabeth: Kaiserin von Oesterreich und Königin von Ungarn (Vienna, 1901). Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.

     Boy described fin-de-siècle Cracow as a city obsessed with "ceremonies," including funerals, for "all solemnities played a disproportionately large role in the life of Cracow"; at Easter, "in all the salons people remarked on how beautiful Bishop Dunajewski appeared with the miter on his silver hair," appraising him as if he were an actor. 19 On the morning of Friday, September 16, 1898, Bishop Puzyna, the successor to the silver-haired Albin Dunajewski, presided over a memorial service for the murdered empress, who was represented by an empty coffin on a catafalque in Cracow's great Church of the Virgin Mary, the Kosciól Mariacki. All the city's clergy, officials, and military officers were present, while "the rest of the church was filled with so much of the public that many people, not being able to get in, remained before the church doors." For the duration of the service, the city's gas lanterns were burning, and the lampposts themselves were hung with black mourning crepe, by order of Friedlein, the president of the municipal council. For those same hours, the council also ordered the closing of shops and businesses, those of Jews as well as Christians. The service, concluding with the singing of the "Salve Regina," was followed by an assembly at the Spiski palace to send off the Cracow delegation, which was now about to set out to attend the empress's true funeral the next day in Vienna. Czas meticulously enumerated all the institutions and organizations that were represented there, from the academy and the university to the Jewish Council and the Uniate Church of the Ukrainians, all sending their sympathy to Vienna with the delegation. "All levels [wszystkie warstwy] and professions of our society were represented," the newspaper proudly proclaimed, returning to the theme of municipal solidarity, "namely officials, intelligentsia, the Cracow middle class, workers, and village people." 20 The liberal Nowa Reforma placed further emphasis on the participation of Cracow's Jews in the public mourning, noting that there would be special services "for the peace of the soul of the empress" in the synagogues on Saturday. 21 Nowa Reforma, at this time, was publishing serially Wladyslaw Reymont's naturalist novel Ziemia obiecana (The Promised Land) about the troubled coexistence of Poles, Germans, and Jews in the industrial city of Lódz in Russian Poland. Liberalism, like conservatism, could find comfort in municipal unity, whether conceived as traditional harmony or modern ecumenicism. Glos Narodu said nothing about mourning among the Jews of Cracow. 12
     The year 1898 was the centennial of the birth of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's most celebrated Romantic poet, and Cracow's love of the ceremonial found some satisfaction in the formalities that surrounded the unveiling of the statue of Mickiewicz in the Rynek, the central market square. In 1890, there had been even more elaborate ceremonies of a funereal nature when Mickiewicz, who died in Constantinople in 1855 and was buried in France, was finally reinterred in Wawel Cathedral in Cracow. In June 1900, as the century turned, Wyspianski published his rhapsody, "Kazimierz Wielki," on the burial of Casimir the Great, which first took place in Cracow when the king died in 1370 and then was ritually reenacted five hundred years later in 1869. In his funeral dirge for Casimir, Wyspianski evoked the same spirit of municipal harmony in Cracow that had been emphasized two years before in the mourning over Elisabeth. 13



 
 
 


Figure 2 : The Sukiennice, the Renaissance Cloth Hall, stands at the center of Cracow's main square, the Rynek. Illustration by Wlodzimierz Tetmajer from Limanowski's Galicya, 1892. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.

And they go gloomy
from all of the churches
with tokens and wreaths,
which flowering, fragrant,
were counted in thousands.
And peasants in long coats
and lords who are dressed
in scarlet clothing and cloaks. 22

14
Czas had described just such an occasion of mournful solidarity in Cracow in September 1898, and in June 1900 the newspaper published Wyspianski's funereal rhapsody.  
     Przybyszewski's Totenmesse, his morbidly decadent Mass for the dead, was originally published in German in Berlin in 1893, but a part of it appeared in Polish, as Msza zalobna, in Cracow in 1900; Czas did not publish it but rather a journal called Mlodosc (Youth). It was Czas, however, that in 1897 had published in installments Tetmajer's novel, Aniol smierci (The Angel of Death), and the newspaper thus "violently rejuvenated itself," according to Boy. 23 In 1899, Tetmajer's fin-de-siècle volume Melancholia included a rhapsodic apostrophe to death, "Do smierci": "O death! white and silent death: we are alone together, the two of us, like a pair of lovers—why not bring your mouth close to my mouth?" 24 The fascination with death, which was also artistically important in fin-de-siècle Vienna, whether in Hofmannsthal's poetry or Gustav Klimt's painting, made imperial murder and municipal mourning into an occasion for the convergence of cultural concerns between literary generations. 15
     Wyspianski, at the same time that he composed his rhapsody, designed a stained-glass window for Wawel Cathedral, showing Casimir as a skeletal cadaver wearing the regalia of royalty. In Wyspianski's funeral dirge, the mourners responded to the ringing of church bells: 16

     And the bells ring to them
from all of the churches
and sounded, and fluttered
with sashes in front,
banners, pennants
funereal. 25

On Saturday, September 17, 1898, at four o'clock, just as the funeral of Elisabeth was beginning in Vienna, a signal from Wawel Cathedral set all the church bells of Cracow ringing. Again, the gas lanterns were lit and were draped with sashes of black crepe. Czas, receiving reports by telephone from Vienna, could inform the public of Cracow about the arrival of the train from Geneva with the corpse of the empress and about the mourning crowds and processions in the Habsburg capital. Cracow had already completed its own funeral service with an empty coffin, but Czas made the Viennese rites into the occasion for further reflection on the significance of the assassination:  

All the peoples were preparing for the jubilee gathering of homage to the monarch; the solemn ceremony was supposed to crown fifty years of government, conducted in the name of justice. All these feelings, which grew and strengthened through a series of long years, were supposed to explode in one single exaltation, to thunder at the throne in one precious and harmonious outcry . . . Instead of triumphal fanfares the mourning bells have sounded . . . A tragic fate compels these peoples to put on black crepe, and to replace the jubilee manifestation with the power of sympathy in sadness. 26

Whereas the Cracow rites had been represented as a demonstration of municipal solidarity among different levels of society, the Vienna funeral was interpreted in terms of "harmonious" multinational solidarity among the peoples of the Habsburg monarchy.  
     In Vienna, the delegates laid on the imperial coffin a flowery wreath with a sash, inscribed "from the city council of Cracow to our ever lamented empress and queen." Czas sought a "psychological truth" in the experience of common suffering, the emotional reinforcement of a "pact of attachment" between Franz Joseph and his subjects: "Millions of these hearts beat in time with the heart of the aching monarch. May this sympathy become balsam . . . The treasury of dynastic feelings, gathered through fifty years of fatherly rule, are multiplied more by the days of mourning than could be done by the most brilliant intoxication of jubilee celebrations. Often the bonds formed by tears are stronger than those joined by joy." 27 Aching hearts, flowing tears, and healing balsam became the emotional imagery of an "intoxication" of mourning, now pronounced truly preferable to mere rejoicing. While the crisis of liberalism in Vienna was preparing for the intellectual revolution of psychoanalysis, nervous conservatism in Cracow responded to "the most hidden secrets of the heart" and invoked the principle of "psychological truth" in order to discover a deeper sentimental affirmation of dynastic loyalty and imperial solidarity. Fin-de-siècle Cracow offered a richly enhanced sentimental vocabulary to a conservative vision of the social contract, or "pact of attachment," based on millions of hearts all beating in time, while mourning bells "ring to them/from all of the churches," ringing in contrapuntal rhythm. 17
     Precisely a month after the assassination, in October, the balsam of suffering and sympathy was still at work in Cracow, with a commemorative Mass for the soul of the empress at the Church of the Bernardines before a "numerous public." Later in October, when students and professors began the academic year at Jagiellonian University, there was a special service for Elisabeth at the Church of St. Anne, conducted by theology professor and church historian Wladyslaw Chotkowski. At the same time, Glos Narodu published a piece of amateur poetry, "At the Coffin of the Empress Elisabeth"; the poem began at the Viennese funeral ("Mourning covers the walls of Vienna . . .") and concluded by comparing her coffin to the metaphorical tomb of partitioned Poland. While Czas looked for imperial solidarity in Polish mourning, the poem in Glos Narodu suggested a more explicitly national dimension: "So today for that heart which has been bloodied, / Let a Polish tear fall among so many tears of sympathy." 28 A copy of the poem was sent to Vienna; eventually, the emperor himself, through the Cracow police department, sent thanks to the author, a high school teacher, "for this manifestation of loyalty," and Franz Joseph requested translated copies for Elisabeth's daughters, the archduchesses Gisela and Marie Valerie. 29 18
     In contrast, however, to this poetic loyalty, in late October there took place in Cracow behind closed doors the trial of a postman named Gimpel Goldberg. He was charged with lèse majesté, suspended from his job, convicted for "praising a criminal act after the death of Her Majesty," and condemned to fourteen days' imprisonment. The provocation for this official action was his alleged remark that the assassin "deserved a medal." 30 The judicial record identified the postman as a native of Cracow, the father of ten children, and a sufferer from chronic headaches. He had also been heard to remark that postal employees deserved higher salaries. As late as the following February, the police in Cracow and L'viv were still investigating the possibility that Goldberg, through the postal service, had made other subversive contacts in Galicia. 31 The secrecy of his October trial suppressed the details of this one dissonant note in the harmony of Cracow's municipal solidarity, the city's unified exaltation of mourning inspired by the assassination of the empress. One presumably Jewish postman had failed to conform to the seemingly mandatory mourning, and he was promptly suspended, charged, condemned, and imprisoned. This single reported instance of dissidence, provoking in response such purposeful suppression, underlined the urgency of the conservative vision of universal sympathy and solidarity. 19


When Bishop Puzyna addressed the Cracow delegates to the Viennese funeral, before the gathered representatives of every level of society, he declared that it was "not only the task of chaplains, but of everyone, to work for the healing of the evil which has sunk such deep roots, and found its expression in anarchy." 32 The assassin, Luigi Luccheni, was, in fact, an Italian anarchist, but the bishop, in the spirit of Cracow conservatism, perorated against anarchy as a general manifestation of universal evil rather than a specific political perspective and workers' movement in nineteenth-century Europe. From the first reports of the assassination, Czas interpreted it in terms of a cosmic struggle between Satanic and Christian principles, with nothing less than civilization itself at stake. The bereaved emperor was quoted as wondering "who could make such an assault on her, she who only did good and no evil to anyone?" Czas rhetorically responded: "In the mysteries of human psychology there is no reply to this question. One must seek for it in the pervasive, demonic currents in modern humanity." The advent of demonic force into modern history was dated to the French Revolution: 20



 
 
 


Figure 3 : One of the last pictures of Empress Elisabeth before her assassination. From A. de Burgh, Elisabeth, 1901. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.

The Empress Elzbieta fell by the dagger of an assassin, like Marie Antoinette one hundred years before on the guillotine. The same furious and infernal tendencies that took possession of the Convention here wielded the murderer's instrument of death . . . In the array of regicides from antiquity to our own times, these two female forms are today surrounded by a common halo as victims of an idea, by which revolutionary madness endeavors to exterminate. 33

Appreciating the assassination of the empress as a crime of ideology, Czas framed its response in the fin-de-siècle language of religiously inflected conservatism, invoking the opposition between hell and the halo. The reference to Marie Antoinette seemed to allude to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, which already in 1790 cherished the French queen as the victim of revolutionary madness. In 1898, Cracow conservatism recognized the devil behind the ideological dagger.  
     The stabbing of Empress Elisabeth demonstrated that revolutionary evil had developed even more insidiously during the century since the execution of Marie Antoinette: 21

Contemporary anarchism outdoes French terrorism; equally monstrous, but much more vile, it lurks treacherously, and from concealment hurls the missile of death among crowds of people . . . What is the source, where the limits, of these insanities? How to heal the soul of humanity from similar infections, how to secure society and every higher authority from extinction? By turning one's mind where today the heavily afflicted monarch turns his mind—toward heaven! The earth is a battlefield between infernal and celestial powers—peoples and thrones stand between Satanic inspirations and the grace of God. In order to put out these underground fires in human souls, it is necessary to draw rays from on high into the social-civilizational structure, to return the current of civilization to the Christian creche. 34

In this Manichaean conception of a human universe polarized between Satanic and celestial forces, Czas could offer only the conventional conservative remedy of Christian principles. The framing of the problem, however, was more notably modern, moving from the "mysteries of human psychology" to the "underground fires in human souls," in search of the concealed ideological culprit that put society and civilization at risk of extinction.  
     Andrzej Walicki has analyzed the importance of Hegelian dialectical philosophy for Polish Romantic Messianism, especially in the case of August Cieszkowski, the author of Ojcze Nasz (Our Father), of which the final volumes only appeared posthumously in 1899 and 1903. Wiktor Weintraub, as well as Walicki, has considered the importance of prophecy and catastrophism in Polish Romanticism, especially in the Paris lectures of Mickiewicz. Finally, Jerzy Jedlicki has indicated the significance of apocalyptic catastrophism, concerning economy and society, for the evolution of Polish conservatism in the nineteenth century. 35 Czas's emphases on cosmic dualism and catastrophic prophecy were consistent with some of the intellectual principles of Polish Romanticism, removed from its revolutionary political impulses and reconceived as Christian conservatism. 22
     Having identified "anarchism" as the fundamental ideological infection hidden within the human soul, Czas considered the political menace of the anarchist movement and seized on the assassination as an occasion for international mobilization. "Just as in our monarchy, so in the entire civilized world," the newspaper recorded, "one shriek of horror and condemnation has gone up on account of the monstrous crime in Geneva." A published list of anarchist attacks in the 1890s mentioned the attempts on the life of the Italian king Umberto in 1893 and 1897 (before the successful assault of 1900) and the assassination of the French president Sadi Carnot in 1894; the published condolences to Franz Joseph from international leaders in 1898 included telegrams from Pope Leo XIII, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria, and President William McKinley (himself later assassinated by a Polish-American anarchist in Buffalo in 1901). Czas viewed anarchism as both more and less than a purely political danger to crowned heads and elected leaders: 23

It is not possible to consider the anarchists as a political party and to evaluate their activity by the standards applied to political offenders. They are only either common criminals who cover their transgressions with the pretenses of some theory, or they are madmen seized by the mania for murder. In both cases they ought to be excluded from general laws, for humanity must defend itself equally from criminals and from the insane if it wants to exist and develop further. 36

Czas thus proposed a sociological and psychological conception of anarchism, alternatively framed as a matter of crime or insanity. The very existence of humanity—of "the entire civilized world"—was at stake, and Czas emphasized the seriousness of the menace by returning to the medical metaphor of infection.  

Completely incomprehensible therefore is the conduct of those states that tolerate not only individual anarchists but even their unions and associations. No government anywhere suffers the official existence of clubs of thieves or brigands, and yet anarchist associations have for their purpose the destruction of property and life. Anarchism is certainly a grievous social disease, and truly for that reason it should be destroyed by all means; if however international understanding suffices to check plague, cholera, smallpox, and other harmful diseases, why should it not suffice to wipe out the pestilence of anarchism. 37

From the conservative perspective of cosmic dualism, the anarchist menace appeared as a Satanic principle transmitted along the social vectors of catastrophic infection.  
     The balance between didactic journalism and apocalyptic prophecy became increasingly unstable as Czas, a week after the funeral, published an informative historical account called "The Origin and Development of Anarchism," while, at the same time, on the front page, meditating about the imminent end of the nineteenth century: 24

The nearer the end of the century, the more threatening the clouds that veil the future. In whatever direction we look, everywhere is unrest and discord . . . The force of racial, social, even confessional hatred is increasing in the world. It is as if, following the angel of faith, the good spirits have flown from the earth—the angel of hope and the angel of love, the spirit of freedom, the spirit of law, and the spirit of progress. Instead monsters and reptiles are crawling out from every side. 38

Citing anarchism in general and the murder of the empress in particular, Czas thus explicitly linked the assassination to the fin-de-siècle spiritual crisis, as conceived from the perspective of Cracow conservatism. In the apocalyptic encounter between angels and spirits, on the one hand, and monsters and reptiles, on the other, the assassination of Elisabeth was a historical manifestation of Manichaean conflict, an indication of that which lay concealed within the hearts of men and hidden behind the clouds that veiled the future of humanity. In 1894, Tetmajer had asked, "What is your shield against the spear of evil, man of the end of the century?" In 1898, after the murder of the empress, Czas recognized the dagger of the anarchist assassin as the instrument of a monstrous evil hovering over the century's end. Tetmajer's man of the end of the century "hung his head silently" at the end of the poem, but Cracow conservatism did not hesitate to identify the only operative shield as "the finger of God and the hand of Providence." Czas declared that "our century is not thoroughly perverted," and, in spite of "moments of eclipse, of decline, of discord, of danger," there was nevertheless reason to believe in the ultimate triumph of redemptive Christianity. Thus the rival generations of fin-de-siècle Cracow, from the perspectives of decadent poetry and of conservative piety, acknowledged the same spiritual crisis.  
     Glos Narodu, by contrast, was more specific in identifying the lurking menace behind the violence of anarchism and in naming the monsters who stalked the turn of the century. Within days of the assassination in September, that newspaper looked into the "infernal band" of Italian anarchists and discerned in all their evil work the "red thread" of "Jewish activity and Masonic work." In February 1899, Glos Narodu began a series of articles entitled "At the Turn of the Century," with a vision of redemption "in the whole world and especially in Galicia" through the struggle for "liberation from moral and material oppression by the Jews." 39 Schorske has demonstrated the importance of anti-Semitic mass politics in Vienna, which was demagogically challenging the earlier prevalence of muncipal liberalism, as in the Christian Socialism of Karl Lueger, who became mayor of Vienna in 1897. Glos Narodu in Cracow attempted to articulate just such a challenge to municipal conservatism, reporting on Lueger himself in September 1898 when the mayor made his own Viennese statement on the assassination of the empress. 40 Lueger was once famously supposed to have summed up his tactical anti-Semitism with the comment, "Wer Jude ist bestimme ich," "I decide who is a Jew." In this same arbitrary spirit, Glos Narodu did not hesitate to attribute even the assassination of the empress to the machinations of the Jews, editorializing in a spirit of demagogic brazenness that trampled on the elaborately articulated conservative principles of Czas. 25
     In November 1898, when Czas celebrated its own jubilee, after fifty years of publishing, the last half of the nineteenth century was still summed up in a spirit of apocalyptic concern, "the always denser darkness of intensifying hatreds and endeavors of destruction." Czas reaffirmed its faith in conservative principles and claimed that Polish society, at least, had proven itself largely immune to the dark endeavor of anarchism during the last fifty years. In 1899, however, the newspaper reviewed the work of the historian Bronislaw Lozinski, reconsidered the massacre of the nobles in Galicia in 1846, and recognized that tragedy under the name of anarchy. 41 Indeed, the principle of anarchy, once satisfactorily defined as a Satanic force that manifested itself in criminality or insanity, offered a convenient alternative to specifying the dynamics of class conflict. In retrospect, the revulsion against murderous anarchism in 1846 could be celebrated as the founding force of nineteenth-century Cracow conservatism. In 1900, as the century turned, Czas reviewed the work of the Polish philosophy professor Henryk Struve and evaluated the concept of "anarchism of the spirit" (anarchizm ducha). Struve had traced the history of philosophical anarchism from Baudelaire through Nietzsche and, finally, to the epicenter of fin-de-siècle literary anarchism, Cracow itself, where Mloda Polska was in the intellectual thrall of the notoriously Satanic Stanislaw Przybyszewski. 42 26
     Struve remarked on Przybyszewski's "naked erotomania" as evidence of his anarchism, but Czas hesitated to accept the verdict, noting Struve's "too imprecise characterization of the manifestations of contemporary art, which must be misunderstood and warped if it is to be forcibly drawn into the pattern of 'anarchism of the spirit.'" 43 Czas was unwilling to dismiss modernist literature, including Przybyszewski, as a mere manifestation of anarchism. Glos Narodu, in fact, even censured Czas for being too sympathetic to Mloda Polska and labeled the literary movement as a pestilential "bacteria culture." In October 1898, a month after the assassination, Glos Narodu found Mloda Polska to be fully infected with the French spirit of "Vive l'anarchie." Although Tetmajer was sincerely admired by Glos Narodu, and even Przybyszewski grudgingly regarded as "at least a person of unusual and original talent," the whole movement had to be condemned for its "socialist-Jewish retinue." 44 The outrage of others underlined the more sympathetic engagement of Czas with its relatively favorable view of Mloda Polska. 27
     Nevertheless, Czas itself had made the explicit equation between Satanism and anarchism in September 1898, and Przybyszewski, whose literary reputation included both of those dubiously distinctive labels, was inevitably controversial for the conservative point of view. Przybyszewski returned to Poland in September 1898, after years of literary celebrity in Germany and Scandinavia; now he settled in Cracow to take up the editorship of Zycie and preside over the modernism of Mloda Polska. His literary Satanism had been acknowledged as recently as the previous year, in 1897, when he published in Germany the essay Die Synagoge des Satan and the novel Satans Kinder, both written in German; Polish versions were published as soon as Przybyszewski returned to Poland in 1899, with the essay appearing in Cracow in Zycie and the novel in L'viv. The Synagogue of Satan offered a somewhat fanciful historical account of Satanism since ancient times, with an enthusiastic salute to Satan's original role as the "god of instinct and fleshly pleasure." In Totenmesse (1893), Przybyszewski had demonstrated his appreciation of the sexual principle, anticipating the psychoanalytic revolution with the scandalously unbiblical pronouncement, "In the beginning there was sex." Boy, remembering Przybyszewski's Cracow disciples with their bohemian morals and alcoholic excesses, celebrated them as "Satan's children" with the master himself as the "good-hearted" Satan. 45
     The novel Satan's Children, however, was not in the least good-hearted. Its central Satanic figure was an anarchist, who went by the Byronic name of Gordon, and masterminded a gratuitous act of anarchistic arson. Gordon affirms that "we are all the children of Satan, all of us who are driven by despair," and that "life is the kingdom of Satan: hell." Asked, "Why do you wish to destroy?" Gordon replies, "Because I hate." 46 He has no qualms about committing any crime, including murder. Thus Przybyszewski, in 1897, had already made precisely the same equation between anarchism and Satanism that Czas articulated in response to the assassination of the empress in 1898. Czas, like Przybyszewski, saw the earth as "a battlefield between infernal and celestial powers," life as a contest "between Satanic inspirations and the grace of God," even though Przybyszewski was capable of artistic sympathy with some aspects of Satanism. Czas also discerned the "underground fires in human souls," but Przybyszewski recognized that they burned with the psychological intensity of human instincts. Cracow conservatism and fin-de-siècle decadence were closely related in their terms of analysis, addressing the Satanic character of anarchism. 28
     In July 1899, Czas published a review essay on works by Przybyszewski that had recently appeared in Polish, including Satan's Children. The reviewer was the Messianic philosopher Wincenty Lutoslawski, who did not particularly admire Przybyszewski's style—"the lack of any artistic elaboration"—or his anarchist characters: "The people whom he presents to us as the children of Satan are, in truth, poor sick victims of the more serious forms of neurosis, leading to hysteria." Lutoslawski further noted the recurrence of the "favorite theme of the author, the violent force of sexual lust," but complained of "monotony" and implausibility. He allowed himself to wonder whether Przybyszewski, in spite of his literary success in "depraved Berlin," would ever manage "to dazzle virtuous Cracow." 47 Przybyszewski lived in Berlin between 1889 and 1894, and he continued to publish there in German after moving on to Norway and then Cracow; Lutoslawski's moral comparison between Berlin and Cracow, a true metropolis and a small city, suggested the difficulty of cultivating urban modernism without modern urbanism. 29
     "All this Satanism exists nowhere and never existed, except in the dreams induced by drunkenness," affirmed Lutoslawski. 48 Yet, in spite of such sensible skepticism, Czas itself was more or less in agreement with Przybyszewski in accepting the existence of Satanism and even its correspondence to anarchism. The morbid ravings, the infectious somnolence, the neurotic intoxications of fin-de-siècle decadence also found some echo in the principles of Cracow conservatism. Although Lutoslawski might insist that such Satanism never existed, when Czas reviewed the concept of "anarchism of the spirit" in 1900, with attention to Przybyszewski, the newspaper also published in an adjoining column a report from Switzerland on assassin Luigi Luccheni in prison. A professor of psychiatry in Switzerland had just published an article declaring Luccheni to be mentally ill: "The gloomy anger of Luccheni and his morbid madness are the symptoms of insanity." 49 In Cracow, Luccheni had become a symptomatic point of reference in the crisis of conservatism at the turn of the century. 30


Luccheni murdered the empress on the afternoon of September 10, 1898, and, in the early age of telephone communication, the news was rapidly disseminated, reaching Cracow by telephone from Vienna around six in the evening. Details of the tragedy arrived by telegraph an hour later. That evening, at the Teatr Miejski, the municipal theater, the company was performing a comedy by the French dramatist Victorien Sardou, and, in the middle of the second act, the play was interrupted by an announcement from the stage, to the full house, that the empress had been assassinated. From the very beginning, therefore, the reception of the news of the assassination was conditioned by a theatrical context. The Cracow public was further informed, in the next day's newspaper, about the announcement of the news to another theater audience in Vienna, where the Burgtheater was sold out for the tragedy of Faust. The performance was about to begin: 31

All at once there was unrest in the whole hall, groups formed, and some began to press in a crowd toward the exit. At the stroke of seven the curtain rose and the artist Robert, already in costume as Faust, announced that the performance was canceled by the highest order. This occurred similarly in the opera and in all the private theaters. The public, exiting from the theaters, filled the streets, and awaited details of the terrible crime. 50

In Cracow, as in Vienna, such audiences went out into the streets to wait for special editions from the newspapers; eventually, they would also read about themselves, about the interrupted performances in which the imperial tragedy supplanted the staged drama of Faust and Mephistopheles. The intensity of theatrical and literary culture in Vienna has been noted by Stefan Zweig in his memoirs, by Hermann Broch in his essay on Hofmannsthal, and by Schorske in his historical studies; theater and literature in Cracow were considerably more limited by the comparatively smaller public but were disproportionately important precisely on that account. Afterwards, looking back, Boy remarked, "in defiance of all the material and physical inadequacies of the city, artistic life developed more fully than ever before" in the 1890s, and, "where real life was so terribly impoverished," modern drama, for instance the plays of Henrik Ibsen, could become "the sole realities." 51 The assassination of Elisabeth, from the moment it was announced in the theater, became a public sensation in which the theatrical, artistic, and poetic values of fin-de-siècle Cracow pervasively influenced and transmuted the representation of journalistic reality.  
     Schorske has stressed the influence of aesthetic culture on journalism in fin-de-siècle Vienna, with particular attention to the feuilleton, a newspaper essay in which the writer "tended to transform objective analysis of the world into subjective cultivation of personal feelings." 52 Czas reacted to the assassination with an anonymously authored front-page obituary feuilleton, published in installments over the course of three days. This meditation on the life and death of the empress began by imagining her own grief at the suicide of her son Crown Prince Rudolf at Mayerling ten years before. "Seeking peace in solitude, in the beauty of nature and art," the empress was represented in print as a focus for the impressions and emotions of the Habsburg public: 32

It was impossible to imagine that she could awaken fanatical hatred, she who, her whole life, brought enchantment with beauty and grace. For that reason amazement seizes the mind, suggesting an image of bestial crime on Lake Geneva. There have been regicides whose bloody deeds had something of monstrous greatness, compelling the fantasy of poets [przykuwajaca fantazye poetów]; but this murderer, whose dagger cut off the days of the Empress Elzbieta, strikes one only with aversion, with abomination, like the shock of nerves at the brutal sight of the figures of common criminals in a peep show at the fair. 53

The strategy of the feuilleton involved the overwhelming of the susceptible mind by suggestive images and impressions, the manipulative appeal to sensitive nerves. Yet, even as the obituary affirmed that the only possible emotional response was aversion and abomination, it was impossible altogether to suppress the deeply decadent idea that assassination could compel "the fantasy of poets." Indeed, it was part of the self-conscious aesthetic scheme of decadent poetry to play perversely on the nerves. The form of the feuilleton, by its subjective nature, was inclined toward such poetic impulses, but the obituary determinedly resisted the Satanic values of Przybyszewski, for whom anarchist reptiles might well have assumed some sort of "monstrous greatness." In his "Confiteor" manifesto, published in Zycie on New Year's Day 1899, Przybyszewski would affirm the absolute value of art for art's sake, including even art that represented "the greatest crimes" (najwieksze zbrodnie). 54 The obituary feuilleton in Czas already conceded that murder could stimulate the aesthetic nerves of fin-de-siècle sensibility.  
     The obituary also affirmed a set of more conservative aesthetic values, discovered in the character of Elisabeth herself. She was saluted for "her sensitivity to everything artistic," including the island of Corfu, the statues of ancient Greece, and the poetry of Heinrich Heine, but especially for her appreciation of nature: "the mysterious pulse of the life of the ocean waves, of forests, and of mountain peaks." 55 Yet a modern artistic movement already existed in Cracow, where the artists' association Sztuka was established in 1897, the same year as the Viennese Sezession; as in the parallel literary movements of Jung-Wien and Mloda Polska, the aesthetic concerns of a younger generation also involved contacts and connections between Cracow and Vienna. 56 Cracow conservatism was not untroubled by the inklings of aesthetic ambivalence in 1898, and finally, after a week of municipal mourning, Czas became less resistant to the sentimental temptations of fin-de-siècle decadence. The story that had been first reported from the stage of the theater was now fully integrated into the dramatic repertory: "The tragic death of the Empress Elzbieta on foreign territory, by the hand of a foreigner, is among the series of dramas that have played continuously in our century on the steps of thrones—but exceptional in its historical significance, we would dare to say [smielibysmy powiedziec], it has a strange poetry and beauty [ma dziwna poezye i pieknosc]; it also arouses exceptional suffering and terror." 57 The almost Aristotelian aspects of the tragedy were articulated in the fin-de-siècle formulas of morbid modern aestheticism. After first refusing to acknowledge any appeal to the fantasy of poets, Czas now fully conceded that the death of the empress, as the tragically inevitable conclusion of her drama, was artistically admirable, suffused with "strange poetry and beauty." The convergence between the older generation of dynastic conservatism and the younger generation of decadent modernism was consummated in a daring ideological concession to the poetry of violence. 33
     On the 1st of March 1899, Arthur Schnitzler's one-act play Der grüne Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo) was first performed in Vienna at the Burgtheater, and before the end of that month it was reviewed in Czas, keeping Cracow up to date on the important dramatic phenomena of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Schnitzler's play was all about the theatricality of violence, about the ways in which violence, even murder, could produce a poetic titillation in the fantasy of susceptible spectators. The play was set in a Paris cabaret, the Green Cockatoo, in which decadent aristocrats went to watch actors playing the parts of violent criminals. The date of the action was July 14, 1789, and the people of Paris were storming the Bastille offstage, so that revolutionary violence became confused with theatrical violence inside the club. "Reality enters into the play," a character commented, "the play into reality." Czas found the message familiar: "variations on a theme of thought that is not new: life is a combination of dream and reality, of falsehood and truth." Boy would later see this as the hallmark of fin-de-siècle Cracow: "Nowhere else as in Cracow did people live so much in the imagination and so little in reality." 58 Schnitzler's drama proposed a perspective on reality that was perfectly conducive to the literary atmosphere of Cracow and a vision of violence consistent with the dramatic appreciation of the assassination six months before. In Vienna, the daughters of Elisabeth, the Habsburg archduchesses, found Schnitzler's play subversively offensive and encouraged its removal from the repertory. 34
     Just as Schorske has suggested that art provided Viennese liberals with an "escape" from the unpleasantness of politics, so in Der grüne Kakadu the aristocratic escape into theatrical fantasy was overtaken and overwhelmed by revolutionary reality outside the Green Cockatoo. 59 The Cracow conservatives who lavished such an exaltation of attentions on the assassination of the empress in 1898, and came to find a certain "strange poetry and beauty" in her death, were also seeking refuge from a more threatening and less poetic reality. It is true that the growing organization of socialist, populist, and nationalist movements in Galicia was distasteful and alarming to Cracow conservatives, and an apocalyptic intimation of anarchistic Satanism served as a sort of distraction from more mundane political menaces. At the same time, however, there were other manifestations of violence in Galicia, which could be neither apocalyptically philosophized nor aesthetically poeticized, still less comprehended and confronted. The articles in Czas during the first week of September addressed the violent events that would be promptly displaced in the press by the assassination of the empress on September 10. On September 5, the trial began in Cracow of forty-four people accused of criminal violence against Jews in various villages of the region, a judicial reckoning with the serious anti-Semitic riots of 1898 in Galicia. Czas told the unsavory story of a village mob, earlier in the year, armed with axes and cudgels, smashing windows and breaking into Jewish taverns in order to destroy the premises, drink the vodka, and steal whatever could be carried away. On September 9, four more defendants were accused in court of public violence and putting people at risk of bodily injury, for breaking the windows of Jewish establishments in nearby Wieliczka. At the same time, Czas was following a murder trial in Sanok, east of Cracow, where a peasant was charged with stabbing to death his wife and her uncle, who happened to be a priest; the defendant claimed to have committed the murder on account of the incestuous relation between the two victims. 60 Such were the stories of unpoetic village violence in Galicia that were conveniently swept aside by the sensational news of the assassination of the empress, far away in Geneva, by the hand of an insane Satanic anarchist. 35



 
 
 


Figure 4 : Galician Jews. Illustration by Wlodzimierz Tetmajer from Limanowski's Galicya, 1892. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.

     By October, it was violence as usual, as a case came to court in Cracow that involved a Jew accused of murdering the agent of the noble Zamojski family in a village near Nowy Targ, in consequence of a dispute over the propinacja, the rights to make and sell alcoholic drink on the Zamojski estate. 61 In general, the violent crimes reported in the pages of Czas involved peasant villagers, with bloody murder occurring in the context of bitter poverty, often within families, and sometimes reflecting the tensions between Christians and Jews in the villages of Galicia. In November, around the time that Luccheni went on trial in Geneva, a peasant was tried in Cracow for the village murder of his son-in-law, a case that also involved suspicions of father-daughter incest. In February 1899, a man came to trial for murdering his brother, and a nineteen-year-old boy was tried for killing a woman who was struck on the forehead while he and his friends were throwing stones at the windows of a Jewish tavern. That same month, the disappearance of a young Christian girl who worked as a servant for a Jewish family provoked village rumors of ritual murder. 62 Such commissions and suspicions of violence were not notably poetic, and although they exercised a certain fascination for the press, they could hardly inspire any "exaltation" in the urban public. Neither were they the crimes of urban violence that one might have found in a modern metropolis, giving cause to reflect on the consequences of urban development; rather, they emphasized the fact that Cracow remained a small town, alarmingly surrounded by the seething violence of village life in Galicia. The issues raised in connection with the assassination of Elisabeth, municipal solidarity in mourning, the menace of Satanic anarchism, and the poetics of violence, were all the more compelling inasmuch as they evaded the everyday regional recurrence of violent crime in Galicia and focused on the rare and remote sensation of Habsburg tragedy. 36


In its account and analysis of the assassination , Cracow conservatism, as expressed in Czas, demonstrated its readiness to appropriate and adapt the issues and themes of the younger generation, indulging with some relish in the spirit of morbid decadence that made violent death into a fin-de-siècle fascination. At the same time, the ongoing unpoetic reporting on violent crime in the villages of Galicia made it possible for the artistic vision of Mloda Polska to advance toward a new perspective on the social and cultural crisis of the province and, ultimately, to bring the "fantasy of poets" to bear on the banality of peasant violence. In March 1901, there took place the first performance of Wyspianski's verse play Wesele (The Wedding), the preeminent dramatic masterpiece of fin-de-siècle Cracow. Wyspianski's achievement emerged from the many influential arenas of the city's theater world, including the Teatr Miejski, which staged the modern dramas of Ibsen in the 1890s, the popular theater, which flourished seasonally in the Park Krakowski in the 1890s before being institutionalized as the Teatr Ludowy in 1900, and, finally, traditional puppet theater, called szopka, which also influenced the conception of the characters in Wesele. 63 The subject of Wesele was the village marriage of a writer from Cracow to a peasant girl, and it was based on the true marriage of Lucjan Rydel in 1900. In addition to the groom, the party coming from Cracow to the country wedding also included someone designated as "the poet," probably based on Tetmajer, and someone else designated as "the journalist," probably based on Rudolf Starzewski, who wrote for Czas. Wyspianski thus staged an encounter between fin-de-siècle Cracow and the Galician countryside, and also between the Polish present and the Polish past, as represented by a series of phantom historical figures who appeared on the scene to haunt and inspire the contemporary characters. 37
     Although the groom rapturously exclaims on the joys of being barefoot in the country, amidst "orchards, fields, meadows, groves," and though the country characters include a young Jewish woman who has read all of Przybyszewski's works, the encounter between the urban and rural contingents is fraught with misconceptions. 64 Perhaps most striking among them is the notion that village life is idyllically peaceful. "Oh, this peace; oh, this quiet," the groom exclaims, while the journalist remarks to the peasant Czepiec: 38
 
      Yes, but here your village is peaceful [wies spokojna].
Let there be war the whole world over,
as long as the Polish village is quiet,
as long as the Polish village is peaceful. 65
Wyspianski's ironic intentions become immediately apparent, when Czepiec replies, "We're ready for any kind of a fight." Later, he appears as the very model of a violent villager:  
 
     CZEPIEC: Well, then just look at my fists;
 just you whistle for me sometime,
 you'll hear the sound of breaking ribs.
HOST: Like with that Jew! 66

Then, when a Jew and a priest arrive on the scene, the former remarks, "Look, good Father, what's going on, the peasants beat each other up." Czepiec owes money to the Jew, and addresses the priest in a rage:  
 
      Good Father don't be mad at me,
but I'm in such a dogged fever
that, dammit, I could even break
the neck of my own brother [nawet rodzonemu bratu]. 67
This sentiment matched the case of actual fratricide reported in the pages of Czas in 1899; more generally, the dramatic conception of unpeaceful peasants, beating up each other and then assaulting the Jews, reflected familiar cases of village violence in Galicia. In 1898, in the aftermath of the anti-Semitic riots, Stanislaw Szeliga was charged in Cracow with lèse majesté, because he told his fellow villagers that he had been to Vienna, where Emperor Franz Joseph informed him personally that it was permissible to beat up Jews. 68  
     Hosting the wedding in Wesele is another urban artist who lives in the village, based on the figure of Wlodzimierz Tetmajer, the half-brother of the poet Kazimierz Tetmajer, and it is the host who articulates the historical significance of peasant violence: 39
     You only have to give them arms,
and they're afire just like dry straw;
just let them see a flashing knife,
and they forget the name of God—
just like it was in forty-six [taki rok czterdziesty szósty]—
the Polish peasants are like that. 69
Thus the massacre of the gentry in 1846 was the historical memory that haunted Wyspianski's staging of fin-de-siècle Cracow's excursion in the country. An old beggar in the cast of characters can still remember the massacre after half a century—"I saw, I watched with my own eyes"—and it is he who later finds himself face to face with the ghost of Jakub Szela, the peasant who took the lead in the violence of 1846.  



 
 
 


Figure 5 : "Peasant and Jewish types in Galicia." Illustration by Wlodzimierz Tetmajer, who himself became the model for the host in Stanislaw Wyspianski's play Wesele (The Wedding), and was thus inserted into a drama involving peasant and Jewish types. From Limanowski's Galicya, 1892. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.

      BEGGAR: Get out of here, hell-hound. GHOST: Don't curse me, you're my brother—
Tremble! It is me—Szela!!
 I came here to the Wedding. 70
The peasant massacre of 1846 in Galicia was the traumatic historical event that fed the founding and the endurance of Cracow conservatism. In 1899, Czas interpreted that vividly remembered violence as a manifestation of "anarchy," the same Satanic principle that explained the assassination of the empress in 1898.  
     Wyspianski's dramatic treatment confirmed the persistent significance of the "ghost" of 1846 in fin-de-siècle Cracow, as rival generations converged in their cultural efforts to explain and exorcise the memory of murderous violence. At the end of the play, the peasants, headed by Czepiec, stand mobilized with their scythes to engage in battle, as they once did on behalf of the Polish national cause, at the time of the Kosciuszko insurrection in 1794. Yet the unpredictability of their violent impulses suggests the possibility that they might even end up venting their anger in the spirit of 1846. The drama thus concludes in the ultimate tension of anticipation, as the characters await some sort of apocalyptic upheaval and the groom thinks that he can discern, in the distance, "blood over Cracow." 71 Even though the action takes place entirely in a peasant village setting, the nightmares of Wesele are those of fin-de-siècle Cracow. Schorske, writing about fin-de-siècle Vienna, invokes Hofmannsthal's verse play of 1892, Der Tod des Tizian, on the death of Titian in sixteenth-century Venice. The artist's disciples gaze upon Venice at night, and experience a nightmarish ambivalence about the magically beautiful city with its disturbing but vital elements of violence and vulgarity. 72 Wyspianski in Wesele explored a similar aesthetic ambivalence in the balance between the city of Cracow and the villages of Galicia. 40
     The figure of the journalist, representing Czas, is haunted by the ghost of Stanczyk, the sixteenth-century court jester whose name was attached to nineteenth-century Cracow conservatism. When the jester remembers the raising of the sixteenth-century Zygmunt bell at Wawel Cathedral, the journalist remarks on the bell's funereal message: 41
 
      And it rings for us today,
when we bury one who's dear [jak grzebiemy, kto nam drogi];
it calls to us, commands us to go
and hear the noises from churches,
in the great confusion of minds,
in the great wailing of prayers. 73
It was at a signal from the Wawel that the church bells of Cracow were set ringing for Elisabeth in 1898, and Cracow conservatives cherished an image of their city echoing piously with mourning bells. Starzewski, the model for the journalist in Wesele, was also the designated reviewer of the drama in Czas in 1901, and his sympathetic review was a watershed in the conservative acceptance of fin-de-siècle cultural values. While Stanislaw Tarnowski, of an older conservative generation, professed to find the play incomprehensible, Starzewski in Czas appreciated the complexity of the dramatic representation of the peasantry and admired the incantatory spell of the poetry, "the balsam of the imagination, soothing the wounds of reality." 74 Stanislaw Estreicher later observed that the friendship between Wyspianski and Starzewski was such that their conversations must have played a part in the development of the drama, which thus emerged from a complex symbiotic relation between the journalism of Czas and the modernism of Mloda Polska. 75 In 1905, Starzewski, at the age of thirty-five, replaced Chylinski as the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, bringing about a generational transition.  
     Yet Starzewski was already a member of the editorial staff in the 1890s, playing a conciliatory role in the cultural conflict of the generations. When Czas included the tragic death of the empress in 1898 among a "series of dramas"—a series consistent in its violence even if the assassination was "exceptional" in its "poetry"—the proscenium boundaries between imaginative drama and political reality were suggestively effaced in the spirit of fin-de-siècle culture. In fact, it was the press that helped make the assassination into a theatrical phenomenon, such that it appeared as part of a dramatic series, reiterated tragedies of violence, culminating in the artistic composition, staged performance, and public acclamation of Wyspianski's Wesele in 1901. The negotiated cultural accommodation between Cracow conservativism and fin-de-siècle modernism occurred in the context of an increasingly delicate relation between imaginative drama and sensational news. The issues of social solidarity, apocalyptic anticipation, and poetic violence made public discussion of the assassination in 1898 into a sort of thematic rehearsal for the theatrical sensation of Wesele in 1901. 42
     Wesele, of course, was not fundamentally a Habsburg drama, and it appealed to symbols and themes of explicitly Polish character. Perhaps its single implicit Habsburg reference occurred when the ghost of Szela remarked, "You see, I've worn my medal." 76 His ostentation curiously echoed the shocking comment of Gimpel Goldberg, who said in 1898 that Luccheni "deserved a medal." It was commonly supposed that Szela had been recognized and rewarded by the Habsburg government for the loyalty demonstrated in the massacre of the insurrectionary Polish nobles in 1846. That allusion alone would have provoked the most distressing associations for Cracow conservatives, with their superlative Habsburg loyalty, for such a medal would have implied that the Habsburg government itself once dabbled in the most diabolical anarchism. 43
     Forty years ago, in the American Historical Review, Carl Schorske discovered in fin-de-siècle Vienna a bridge between traditional politics and modernist literature in Hofmannsthal's dramatic appreciation of political ritual: "This ritualistic concept of politics bears the clear stamp of the Habsburg tradition. In the late Austrian Empire, the imperial office, with its aura of ceremonial formalism, was the only effective focus of civic loyalty." 77 Elisabeth was all the more readily mourned in Cracow, in an "exaltation" of dynastic loyalty, because her assassination demonstrated the polar opposition between the principles of Satanic anarchy and imperial order. The apparent relish of the conservative coverage indicated that the cultural values of fin-de-siècle Cracow were attuned to those of fin-de-siècle Vienna, revealing a morbid sentimental ambivalence about death, an interest in the psychological mysteries of destructive violence, and a susceptibility to the confusion of theater and reality. In 1899, the prompt review in Czas of Der grüne Kakadu demonstrated the sensitivity of Cracow to ideological and dramatic developments in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Yet writers like Przybyszewski and Wyspianski were not particularly conditioned by Viennese cultural influences. Przybyszewski had lived in Berlin and was further influenced by Scandinavian models of modernism, while Wyspianski had lived in Paris for formative periods in the 1890s and most admired the Belgian modernism of dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck. Many European currents thus conditioned the culture of fin-de-siècle Cracow, but, because of the crucial conservative principle of dynastic loyalism, the force of Habsburg mythology and ideology could exercise a magnetic effect on Polish intellectual life. At the moment of the anarchist assassination of the empress, the hegemonic generation of Cracow conservatism responded in a spirit of rejuvenated fin-de-siècle fervor to the urgent sentimental agenda of the imperial Habsburg context. 44



    Larry Wolff is a professor of history at Boston College, where he has been on the faculty since 1986. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1984, and his adviser was Wayne Vucinich. Wolff is the author of The Vatican and Poland in the Age of the Partitions (1988), Postcards from the End of the World: Child Abuse in Freud's Vienna (1988), Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994), and, most recently, Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (2001). His current research focuses on eighteenth-century Venice and on Habsburg Galicia. A recent contribution concerning Galicia was the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (2000). That essay, tentatively titled "Galician Fantasies: The Habsburg Geography of Sexual Perversion," was discreetly published by Penguin as "Introduction."



Notes


My research in Cracow was generously supported by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). I am grateful to David Frick for reading the manuscript and to Patrice Dabrowski, Laurie Koloski, and Nathaniel Wood for the benefit of their Cracow expertise. In Cracow, I had the good fortune to receive assistance and advice from Jacek Purchla, Krzysztof Zamorski, Emil Orzechowski, Waclaw Twardzik, and Deryn Verity. I am grateful for general advice about readings in urban history from Michael Wilson, Laura Frader, Peter Weiler, and David Quigley. I wish to acknowledge the inspiration of my Polish professor, the late Wiktor Weintraub, who, twenty-five years ago, first introduced me to fin-de-siècle Cracow. The conception of this article also owes much to an imperial fascination with the Habsburgs, especially Elisabeth, that I shared for many years with the late William Abrahams.

1 Carl E. Schorske, "Politics and the Psyche in fin-de-siècle Vienna: Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal," AHR 68 (July 1961): 930–46; rpt. in Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980; New York, 1981), 3–23; Péter Hanák, The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton, N.J., 1998), xv–xvi; see also Katherine David-Fox, "Prague-Vienna, Prague-Berlin: The Hidden Geography of Czech Modernism," Slavic Review 59 (Winter 2000): 743–50.

2 Maria Podraza-Kwiatkowska, Literatura Mlodej Polski (Warsaw, 1992), 5–70, 108–18, 176–216; Tomasz Weiss, Cyganeria Mlodej Polski (Cracow, 1970), 5–77; Kazimierz Wyka, "Kraków stolica Mlodej Polski," Kraków i Malopolska przez dzieje, Celina Bobinska, ed. (Cracow, 1970), 339–52; Harold Segel, "Cracow: Little Green Balloons," in Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret (New York, 1987), 221–53; Piotr Wandycz, "The Era of 'Young Poland,'" in The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Seattle, 1974), 371–80; David Crowley, "Castles, Cabarets, and Cartoons: Claims on Polishness in Kraków around 1905," in The City in Central Europe: Culture and Society from 1800 to the Present, Malcolm Gee, Tim Kirk, and Jill Steward, eds. (Brookfield, Vt., 1999), 101–17; Czeslaw Milosz, "Young Poland," in The History of Polish Literature (1969; rpt. edn., Berkeley, Calif., 1983), 322–79; see also Artur Hutnikiewicz, Mloda Polska (Warsaw, 1994); Janina Kulczycka, Irena Maciejewska, Andrzej Makowiecki, and Roman Taborski, Literatura Polska: Mloda Polska (Warsaw, 1991); Kazimierz Wyka, Modernizm polski (Cracow, 1968); Piotr Krakowski, "Cracow Artistic Milieu around 1900," in Art around 1900 in Central Europe: Art Centres and Provinces, Piotr Krakowski and Jacek Purchla, eds. (Cracow, 1999), 71–79.

3 Tomasz Weiss, "Czy Kraków byl stolica Mlodej Polski," and Wojciech Bartel, "Czy Kraków na przelomie XIX i XX wieku byl polskim Rzymem," in Kraków na przelomie XIX i XX wieku: Materialy sesji naukowej z okazji Dni Krakowa w 1981 roku (Cracow, 1983), 56–74, 75–88.

4 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, xxvi.

5 Boy [Tadeusz Zelenski], "Prawy brzeg Wisly," Znaszli ten kraj? . . . i inne spomnienia (Cracow, 1962), 7–14.

6 Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Peter Demetz, ed. (New York, 1986), 146–62; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, 1973), 142–247; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1988), 131–286; Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York, 1961), 410–45; Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 179–214; Karl Bosl, "Die mitteleuropäische Stadt des 19. Jahrhunderts im Wandel von Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Staat, Kultur," in Die Städte Mitteleuropas im 19. Jahrhundert, Wilhelm Rausch, ed. (Linz, 1983); Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske, "Budapest and New York Compared," in Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870–1930 (New York, 1994), 1–28; see also Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (New York, 1986); Christine Stansell, Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York, 2000).

7 Jan Malecki, "Lwów i Kraków: Dwie stolice Galicji," Roczniki dziejów spolecznych i gospodarczych 50 (1989): 119–31; Malecki, "W dobie autonomii galicyjskiej (1866–1918)," Dzieje Krakowa: Kraków w latach 1796–1918, Janina Bieniarzówna and Malecki, eds. (Cracow, 1979), 225–394; Jacek Purchla, Matecznik Polski (Cracow, 1992), 19–69; Purchla, Jak powstal nowoczesny Kraków (Cracow, 1990), 19–58; Józef Buszko, "Kraków w dobie autonomii galicyjskiej (1866–1914)," Szkice z dziejów Krakowa: Od czasów najdawniejszych do pierwszej wojny swiatowej, Janina Bieniarzówna, ed. (Cracow, 1968), 355–89; Lawrence Orton, "The Formation of Modern Cracow (1866–1914)," Austrian History Yearbook 19/20 (1983–1984): part 1, 105–17.

8 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 8.

9 Boy, "Zakrystia," Znaszli ten kraj? 34–43; Jerzy Myslinski, "Prasa polska w Galicji w dobie autonomicznej (1867–1918)," Prasa Polska w latach 1864–1918, Jerzy lojek, ed. (Warsaw, 1976), 121–28.

10 Boy, "Zakrystia," Znaszli ten kraj? 40.

11 Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin, 1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 1–169; David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York, 1998), 1–25, 101–35; Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 1–44.

12 Kazimierz Tetmajer, "Koniec wieku XIX," Antologia liryki Mlodej Polski, Ireneusz Sikora, ed. (Wroclaw, 1990), 137–38, transl. by Czeslaw Milosz in History of Polish Literature, 336–37.

13 Czas, September 11, 1898, Nadzwyczajny Dodatek (Special Supplement); September 13, 1898.

14 Wandycz, Lands of Partitioned Poland, 214–28; Philip Pajakowski, "Dynamics of Galician Polish Conservatism in the Late Nineteenth Century," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 43 (1995): 19–33; Lawrence Orton, "The Stanczyk Portfolio and the Politics of Galician Loyalism," The Polish Review 27, nos. 1–2 (1982): 55–64; Stanislaw Grodziski, W Królestwie Galicji i Lodomerii (Cracow, 1976), 215–82; see also Kazimierz Wyka, Teka Stanczyka na tle historii Galicji w latach 1849–1869 (Wroclaw, 1951).

15 Malecki, "W dobie autonomii galicyjskiej (1866–1918)," 314; Purchla, Matecznik Polski, 46–55.

16 Malecki, "W dobie autonomii galicyjskiej (1866–1918)," 244, 317.

17 Czas, September 13, 1898, September 14, 1898, September 15, 1898.

18 Glos Narodu, September 12, 1898.

19 Boy, "Prawy brzeg Wisly," Znaszli ten kraj? 11–12.

20 Czas, September 16, 1898, September 17, 1898.

21 Nowa Reforma, September 14, 1898.

22 Stanislaw Wyspianski, "Kazimierz Wielki," Dziela zebrane, Vol. 11: Rapsody, Hymn, Wiersze (Cracow, 1961), 38–39; Alicja Okonska, Stanislaw Wyspianski (Warsaw, 1971), 309–21.

23 Boy, "Chrzyciny Ivi," Znaszli ten kraj? 119.

24 Kazimierz Tetmajer, Melancholia (Warsaw and Cracow, 1899), 27; Wyka, Modernizm polski, 92–101; see also Jan Blonski, "Kazimierz Tetmajer," in Literatura okresu Mlodej Polski, Kazimierz Wyka, Artur Hutnikiewicz, and Miroslawa Puchalska, eds. (Warsaw, 1967–68), 1: 279–97; Krystyna Jablonska, Kazimierz Tetmajer (Cracow, 1969).

25 Wyspianski, "Kazimierz Wielki," 38.

26 Czas, September 16, 1898, September 20, 1898.

27 Czas, September 16, 1898, September 20, 1898.

28 Czas, October 11, 1898, October 22, 1898; Glos Narodu, October 22, 1898.

29 Dyrekcja Policji w Krakowie, Archiwum Panstwowe w Krakowie, register 52 (1899), file 116.

30 Czas, October 28, 1898; Glos Narodu, October 28, 1898; Nowa Reforma, October 29, 1898.

31 Sad Krajowy Karny w Krakowie, Archiwum Panstwowe w Krakowie, register 590 (1898), file 1241; Dyrekcja Policji w Krakowie, Archiwum Panstwowe w Krakowie, register 52 (1899), file 189.

32 Czas, September 17, 1898.

33 Czas, September 13, 1898.

34 Czas, September 13, 1898.

35 Andrzej Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (Oxford, 1982), 127–45; Jerzy Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Civilization (1988; rpt. edn., Budapest, 1999), 103–65; Wiktor Weintraub, Poeta i prorok: Rzecz o profetyzmie Mickiewicza (Warsaw, 1982), 344–432.

36 Czas, September 14, 1898, September 17, 1898.

37 Czas, September 17, 1898.

38 Czas, September 22, 1898.

39 Glos Narodu, September 15, 1898, February 8, 1899.

40 Glos Narodu, September 13, 1898; Carl Schorske, "Politics in a New Key: An Austrian Trio," in Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 133–46.

41 Czas, July 7, 1899, July 8, 1899; see also Thomas Simons, Jr., "The Peasant Revolt of 1846 in Galicia: Recent Polish Historiography," Slavic Review 30 (December 1971): 795–817.

42 Czas, March 23, 1900.

43 Czas, March 23, 1900.

44 Glos Narodu, October 29, 1898.

45 Stanislaw Przybyszewski, Die Synagoge des Satan (Berlin, 1897), 8; Przybyszewski, Totenmesse (Berlin, 1900), 5; Boy, "Dzieci Szatana," Znaszli ten kraj? 113; see also David-Fox, "Prague-Vienna, Prague-Berlin," 750–58; Artur Hutnikiewicz, "Stanislaw Przybyszewski," in Literatura okresu Mlodej Polski, 2: 107–20; George Klim, Stanislaw Przybyszewski: Leben, Werk und Weltanschauung im Rahmen der deutschen Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (Paderborn, 1992); Maria Kuncewiczowa, Fantasia alla polacca (Warsaw, 1979); Maxime Herman, Stanislas Przybyszewski (Lille, 1939).

46 Przybyszewski, Dzieci Szatana, Gabriela Matuszek, ed. (Cracow, 1993), 16, 32; Wyka, Modernizm polski, 101–12.

47 Czas, July 28, 1899; see also Fritzsche, Reading Berlin, 1900, 127–69; and Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 1–35.

48 Czas, July 28, 1899.

49 Czas, March 23, 1900.

50 Czas, September 11, 1898, Nadzwyczajny Dodatek.

51 Boy, "Wiatr nad Krakowem," Znaszli ten kraj? 65; "Ariel i Kaliban," Znaszli ten kraj? 74; Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, Harry Zohn, ed. (Lincoln, Neb., 1964), 12–20; Hermann Broch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time: The European Imagination, 1860–1920, Michael Steinberg, ed. (Chicago, 1984), 59–65; Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 5–10.

52 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 9.

53 Czas, September 13, 1898.

54 Stanislaw Przybyszewski, "Confiteor," in Andrzej Makowiecki, Mloda Polska (Warsaw, 1981), 198.

55 Czas, September 14, 1898.

56 Krakowski, "Cracow Artistic Milieu around 1900," 76–77; Roman Taborski, Wsród wiedenskich poloników (Cracow, 1983), 150–63; Taborski, Polacy w Wiedniu (Wroclaw, 1992), 102–54.

57 Czas, September 18, 1898.

58 Czas, March 23, 1899; Boy, "Prawy brzeg Wisly," Znaszli ten kraj? 12.

59 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 8.

60 Czas, September 3, 1898, September 6, 1898, September 10, 1898; Frank Golczewski, Polnische-Jüdische Beziehungen 1881–1922 (Wiesbaden, 1981), 60–84; Golczewski, "Rural Anti-Semitism in Galicia before World War I," in The Jews in Poland, Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk, and Antony Polonsky, eds. (Oxford, 1986), 97–105.

61 Czas, October 13, 1898.

62 Czas, November 5, 1898, November 7, 1898, November 9, 1898.

63 Jan Michalik, "Teatr krakowski w latach 1893–1918," in Dzieje teatru polskiego, Tadeusz Sivert, ed., Vol. 4: Teatr polski w latach 1890–1918: Zabór austriacki i pruski (Warsaw, 1987), 45–193; Ryszard Górski, Dramat ludowy XIX wieku (Warsaw, 1969), 211–32; Milosz, History of Polish Literature, 355–57.

64 Stanislaw Wyspianski, The Wedding, Gerard Kapolka, trans. (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990), 50, 53; Aniela lempicka, Wyspianski: Pisarz dramatyczny; Idee i formy (Cracow, 1973), 279–345; Okonska, Stanislaw Wyspianski, 235–72; see also Claude Backvis, Le dramaturge Stanislas Wyspianski (Paris, 1952).

65 Wyspianski, The Wedding, 28.

66 Wyspianski, The Wedding, 63.

67 Wyspianski, The Wedding, 69, 72.

68 Sad Krajowy Karny w Krakowie, Archiwum Panstwowe w Krakowie, register 590 (1898), file 905.

69 Wyspianski, The Wedding, 72–73.

70 Wyspianski, The Wedding, 67, 112.

71 Wyspianski, The Wedding, 181.

72 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 16–18.

73 Wyspianski, The Wedding, 96.

74 Aniela lempicka, ed., Wesele we wspomnieniach i krytyce (Cracow, 1961), 26–27, 123–26, 197–201.

75 lempicka, Wesele we wspomnieniach i krytyce, 41–45.

76 Wyspianski, The Wedding, 113.

77 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 21.


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