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Dynastic Conservatism and Poetic Violence in Fin-de-Siècle Cracow: The Habsburg Matrix of Polish Modernism
LARRY WOLFF
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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. |
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In Polish historiography and literary
history, fin-de-siècle Cracow has been most often treated
in the national context of
M oda
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 M oda
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. |
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The
designation M oda
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 Stanis aw
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 Stanis aw
Wyspia ski,
born in 1869, and were amused at the cabaret songs of the slightly
younger Tadeusz ele ski,
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 Wspó cze ni
(My Contemporaries) in 1930 and Boy's Znaszli ten kraj? (Do
You Know the Land?) in 1931. |
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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.
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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 G os
Narodu (Voice of the Nation).
9
With its populist impulse, G os
Narodu was particularly inclined to polemicize contemptuously
against Czas. |
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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 Wyspia ski
and, finally, in 1901, after three days of hesitating silence, gave
an enthusiastic review to the premiere of Wyspia ski'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.
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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
ycie
(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. |
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In a special edition of Czas on September
11, 1898, the editor, Micha
Chyli ski,
reported to his readers the news, received from Vienna by telephone,
of the assassination of Elisabeth (El bieta
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: |
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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.
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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, Najja niejszy
Panie, stoimy i sta
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.
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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 Stanis aw
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 "Sta czyk"
ideology, named for a sixteenth-century court jester. |
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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, G os
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 Przegl d
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 Daszy ski,
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. |
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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 W adys aw
Knapi ski,
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. G os
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,
G os
Narodu conceded that "the whole city was in a true fever."
18
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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.
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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 Ko ció
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 W adys aw
Reymont's naturalist novel Ziemia obiecana (The Promised
Land) about the troubled coexistence of Poles, Germans, and Jews
in the industrial city of ód
in Russian Poland. Liberalism, like conservatism, could find comfort
in municipal unity, whether conceived as traditional harmony or
modern ecumenicism. G os
Narodu said nothing about mourning among the Jews of Cracow. |
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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, Wyspia ski
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, Wyspia ski
evoked the same spirit of municipal harmony in Cracow that had been
emphasized two years before in the mourning over Elisabeth. |
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Figure
2
: The Sukiennice, the Renaissance Cloth Hall, stands at
the center of Cracow's main square, the Rynek. Illustration
by W odzimierz
Tetmajer from Limanowski's Galicya, 1892. Courtesy
of the Harvard College Library.
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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
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Czas had described just such an occasion of mournful solidarity
in Cracow in September 1898, and in June 1900 the newspaper published
Wyspia ski's
funereal rhapsody. |
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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 a obna,
in Cracow in 1900; Czas did not publish it but rather a journal
called M odo
(Youth). It was Czas, however, that in 1897 had published
in installments Tetmajer's novel, Anio
mierci
(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
mierci":
"O death! white and silent death: we are alone together, the two
of us, like a pair of loverswhy 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. |
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Wyspia ski,
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 Wyspia ski's
funeral dirge, the mourners responded to the ringing of church bells: |
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And the bells ring to them
from all of the churches
and sounded, and fluttered
with sashes in front,
banners, pennants
funereal.
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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: |
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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.
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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. |
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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 W adys aw
Chotkowski. At the same time, G os
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 G os
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 El bieta
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
mindtoward heaven! The earth is a battlefield between infernal
and celestial powerspeoples 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 humanityof "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 earththe 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. |
|
G os
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,
G os
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. G os
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, G os
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 Bronis aw
ozi ski,
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
M oda
Polska was in the intellectual thrall of the notoriously Satanic
Stanis aw
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. G os
Narodu, in fact, even censured Czas for being too sympathetic
to M oda
Polska and labeled the literary movement as a pestilential "bacteria
culture." In October 1898, a month after the assassination, G os
Narodu found M oda
Polska to be fully infected with the French spirit of "Vive
l'anarchie." Although Tetmajer was sincerely admired by G os
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 M oda
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 ycie
and preside over the modernism of M oda
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 ycie
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 Lutos awski,
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." Lutos awski
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;
Lutos awski'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 Lutos awski.
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 Lutos awski
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 [przykuwaj c
fantazy
poetów]; but this murderer, whose dagger cut off the
days of the Empress El bieta,
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
ycie
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" (najwi ksze
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 M oda
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 El bieta
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 thronesbut exceptional in its historical significance,
we would dare to say [ mieliby my
powiedzie ],
it has a strange poetry and beauty [ma dziwn
poezy
i pi kno ];
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 W odzimierz
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 M oda
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 Wyspia ski's
verse play Wesele (The Wedding), the preeminent dramatic
masterpiece of fin-de-siècle Cracow. Wyspia ski'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. Wyspia ski
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 [wie
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
|
|
Wyspia ski'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, Stanis aw
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 W odzimierz
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 Wyspia ski'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
W odzimierz
Tetmajer, who himself became the model for the host in Stanis aw
Wyspia ski'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 meSzela!!
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. |
|
Wyspia ski'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 Ko ciuszko
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
Wyspia ski
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 Sta czyk,
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
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|
|
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 Stanis aw
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
Stanis aw
Estreicher later observed that the friendship between Wyspia ski
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 M oda
Polska.
75
In 1905, Starzewski, at the age of thirty-five, replaced Chyli ski
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 Wyspia ski'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 Wyspia ski
were not particularly conditioned by Viennese cultural influences.
Przybyszewski had lived in Berlin and was further influenced by
Scandinavian models of modernism, while Wyspia ski
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, Wac aw
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): 93046;
rpt. in Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and
Culture (1980; New York, 1981), 323; Péter Hanák,
The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History
of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton, N.J., 1998), xvxvi;
see also Katherine David-Fox, "Prague-Vienna, Prague-Berlin: The
Hidden Geography of Czech Modernism," Slavic Review 59
(Winter 2000): 74350.
2 Maria Podraza-Kwiatkowska,
Literatura M odej
Polski (Warsaw, 1992), 570, 10818, 176216;
Tomasz Weiss, Cyganeria M odej
Polski (Cracow, 1970), 577; Kazimierz Wyka, "Kraków
stolica M odej
Polski," Kraków i Ma opolska
przez dzieje, Celina Bobi ska,
ed. (Cracow, 1970), 33952; Harold Segel, "Cracow: Little
Green Balloons," in Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret (New York,
1987), 22153; Piotr Wandycz, "The Era of 'Young Poland,'"
in The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 17951918 (Seattle,
1974), 37180; 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), 10117; Czes aw
Mi osz,
"Young Poland," in The History of Polish Literature (1969;
rpt. edn., Berkeley, Calif., 1983), 32279; see also Artur
Hutnikiewicz, M oda
Polska (Warsaw, 1994); Janina Kulczycka, Irena Maciejewska,
Andrzej Makowiecki, and Roman Taborski, Literatura Polska:
M oda
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), 7179.
3 Tomasz Weiss, "Czy
Kraków by
stolic
M odej
Polski," and Wojciech Bartel, "Czy Kraków na prze omie
XIX i XX wieku by
polskim Rzymem," in Kraków na prze omie
XIX i XX wieku: Materia y
sesji naukowej z okazji Dni Krakowa w 1981 roku (Cracow, 1983),
5674, 7588.
4 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle
Vienna, xxvi.
5
Boy [Tadeusz ele ski],
"Prawy brzeg Wis y,"
Znaszli ten kraj? . . . i inne spomnienia (Cracow,
1962), 714.
6 Walter Benjamin,
"Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in Reflections:
Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Peter Demetz,
ed. (New York, 1986), 14662; Raymond Williams, The Country
and the City (New York, 1973), 142247; Marshall Berman,
All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(New York, 1988), 131286; Lewis Mumford, The City in
History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
(New York, 1961), 41045; Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen
Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 10001950 (Cambridge,
Mass., 1985), 179214; 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, 18701930 (New
York, 1994), 128; see also Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris:
Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 18301930
(New York, 1986); Christine Stansell, Bohemian New York and
the Creation of a New Century (New York, 2000).
7 Jan Ma ecki,
"Lwów i Kraków: Dwie stolice Galicji," Roczniki
dziejów spo ecznych
i gospodarczych 50 (1989): 11931; Ma ecki,
"W dobie autonomii galicyjskiej (18661918)," Dzieje Krakowa:
Kraków w latach 17961918, Janina Bieniarzówna
and Ma ecki,
eds. (Cracow, 1979), 225394; Jacek Purchla, Matecznik
Polski (Cracow, 1992), 1969; Purchla, Jak powsta
nowoczesny Kraków (Cracow, 1990), 1958; Józef
Buszko, "Kraków w dobie autonomii galicyjskiej (18661914),"
Szkice z dziejów Krakowa: Od czasów najdawniejszych
do pierwszej wojny wiatowej,
Janina Bieniarzówna, ed. (Cracow, 1968), 35589; Lawrence
Orton, "The Formation of Modern Cracow (18661914)," Austrian
History Yearbook 19/20 (19831984): part 1, 10517.
8 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle
Vienna, 8.
9 Boy, "Zakrystia,"
Znaszli ten kraj? 3443; Jerzy My li ski,
"Prasa polska w Galicji w dobie autonomicznej (18671918),"
Prasa Polska w latach 18641918, Jerzy ojek,
ed. (Warsaw, 1976), 12128.
10 Boy, "Zakrystia,"
Znaszli ten kraj? 40.
11 Peter Fritzsche,
Reading Berlin, 1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 1169;
David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces
in Antebellum New York (New York, 1998), 125, 10135;
Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture
in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 144.
12 Kazimierz Tetmajer,
"Koniec wieku XIX," Antologia liryki M odej
Polski, Ireneusz Sikora, ed. (Wroc aw,
1990), 13738, transl. by Czes aw
Mi osz
in History of Polish Literature, 33637.
13 Czas,
September 11, 1898, Nadzwyczajny Dodatek (Special Supplement);
September 13, 1898.
14 Wandycz, Lands
of Partitioned Poland, 21428; Philip Pajakowski, "Dynamics
of Galician Polish Conservatism in the Late Nineteenth Century,"
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 43 (1995):
1933; Lawrence Orton, "The Sta czyk
Portfolio and the Politics of Galician Loyalism," The Polish
Review 27, nos. 12 (1982): 5564; Stanis aw
Grodziski, W Królestwie Galicji i Lodomerii (Cracow,
1976), 21582; see also Kazimierz Wyka, Teka Sta czyka
na tle historii Galicji w latach 18491869 (Wroc aw,
1951).
15 Ma ecki,
"W dobie autonomii galicyjskiej (18661918)," 314; Purchla,
Matecznik Polski, 4655.
16 Ma ecki,
"W dobie autonomii galicyjskiej (18661918)," 244, 317.
17 Czas,
September 13, 1898, September 14, 1898, September 15, 1898.
18 G os
Narodu, September 12, 1898.
19 Boy, "Prawy brzeg
Wis y,"
Znaszli ten kraj? 1112.
20 Czas,
September 16, 1898, September 17, 1898.
21 Nowa Reforma,
September 14, 1898.
22 Stanis aw
Wyspia ski,
"Kazimierz Wielki," Dzie a
zebrane, Vol. 11: Rapsody, Hymn, Wiersze (Cracow, 1961),
3839; Alicja Oko ska,
Stanis aw
Wyspia ski
(Warsaw, 1971), 30921.
23 Boy, "Chrzyciny
Ivi," Znaszli ten kraj? 119.
24 Kazimierz Tetmajer,
Melancholia (Warsaw and Cracow, 1899), 27; Wyka, Modernizm
polski, 92101; see also Jan B o ski,
"Kazimierz Tetmajer," in Literatura okresu M odej
Polski, Kazimierz Wyka, Artur Hutnikiewicz, and Miros awa
Puchalska, eds. (Warsaw, 196768), 1: 27997; Krystyna
Jab o ska,
Kazimierz Tetmajer (Cracow, 1969).
25 Wyspia ski,
"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; G os
Narodu, October 22, 1898.
29 Dyrekcja Policji
w Krakowie, Archiwum Pa stwowe
w Krakowie, register 52 (1899), file 116.
30 Czas,
October 28, 1898; G os
Narodu, October 28, 1898; Nowa Reforma, October 29,
1898.
31 S d
Krajowy Karny w Krakowie, Archiwum Pa stwowe
w Krakowie, register 590 (1898), file 1241; Dyrekcja Policji
w Krakowie, Archiwum Pa stwowe
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), 12745; Jerzy Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe:
Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Civilization (1988;
rpt. edn., Budapest, 1999), 10365; Wiktor Weintraub, Poeta
i prorok: Rzecz o profetyzmie Mickiewicza (Warsaw, 1982),
344432.
36 Czas,
September 14, 1898, September 17, 1898.
37 Czas,
September 17, 1898.
38 Czas,
September 22, 1898.
39 G os
Narodu, September 15, 1898, February 8, 1899.
40 G os
Narodu, September 13, 1898; Carl Schorske, "Politics in a
New Key: An Austrian Trio," in Fin-de-siècle Vienna,
13346.
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): 795817.
42 Czas,
March 23, 1900.
43 Czas,
March 23, 1900.
44 G os
Narodu, October 29, 1898.
45 Stanis aw
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," 75058; Artur Hutnikiewicz, "Stanis aw
Przybyszewski," in Literatura okresu M odej
Polski, 2: 10720; 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, 10112.
47 Czas,
July 28, 1899; see also Fritzsche, Reading Berlin, 1900,
12769; and Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge,
Mass., 1993), 135.
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), 1220; Hermann Broch,
Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time: The European Imagination,
18601920, Michael Steinberg, ed. (Chicago, 1984), 5965;
Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 510.
52 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle
Vienna, 9.
53 Czas,
September 13, 1898.
54 Stanis aw
Przybyszewski, "Confiteor," in Andrzej Makowiecki, M oda
Polska (Warsaw, 1981), 198.
55 Czas,
September 14, 1898.
56 Krakowski, "Cracow
Artistic Milieu around 1900," 7677; Roman Taborski, W ród
wiede skich
poloników (Cracow, 1983), 15063; Taborski, Polacy
w Wiedniu (Wroc aw,
1992), 10254.
57 Czas,
September 18, 1898.
58 Czas,
March 23, 1899; Boy, "Prawy brzeg Wis y,"
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 18811922
(Wiesbaden, 1981), 6084; 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), 97105.
61 Czas,
October 13, 1898.
62 Czas,
November 5, 1898, November 7, 1898, November 9, 1898.
63 Jan Michalik,
"Teatr krakowski w latach 18931918," in Dzieje teatru
polskiego, Tadeusz Sivert, ed., Vol. 4: Teatr polski w
latach 18901918: Zabór austriacki i pruski (Warsaw,
1987), 45193; Ryszard Górski, Dramat ludowy XIX
wieku (Warsaw, 1969), 21132; Mi osz,
History of Polish Literature, 35557.
64 Stanis aw
Wyspia ski,
The Wedding, Gerard Kapolka, trans. (Ann Arbor, Mich.,
1990), 50, 53; Aniela empicka,
Wyspia ski:
Pisarz dramatyczny; Idee i formy (Cracow, 1973), 279345;
Oko ska,
Stanis aw
Wyspia ski,
23572; see also Claude Backvis, Le dramaturge Stanislas
Wyspianski (Paris, 1952).
65 Wyspia ski,
The Wedding, 28.
66 Wyspia ski,
The Wedding, 63.
67 Wyspia ski,
The Wedding, 69, 72.
68 S d
Krajowy Karny w Krakowie, Archiwum Pa stwowe
w Krakowie, register 590 (1898), file 905.
69 Wyspia ski,
The Wedding, 7273.
70 Wyspia ski,
The Wedding, 67, 112.
71 Wyspia ski,
The Wedding, 181.
72 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle
Vienna, 1618.
73 Wyspia ski,
The Wedding, 96.
74 Aniela empicka,
ed., Wesele we wspomnieniach i krytyce (Cracow, 1961),
2627, 12326, 197201.
75 empicka,
Wesele we wspomnieniach i krytyce, 4145.
76 Wyspia ski,
The Wedding, 113.
77 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle
Vienna, 21.
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