The past of people, including the simplest ones as the ancestors of many of us, is worth and worthy of describing. The problem begins erstwhile it turns into a suit against others. And this happens erstwhile we don't usage the safety measures provided by historiography that show all contexts. Then the past of simple people manifests itself in an ideological trend folk history. Just as democracy was erstwhile transformed into folk democracy a Rzeczpospolita Polska w Polish People's Republic. There are no cases here," writes Krystian Kratiuk on the pages of the PCH24.PL QUARTALIST.
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This begins innocently, without sick will. individual just wants to show the communicative of the lives of their grandparents who lived in the country, were poor, there were rich people next to them, the grandparents did not remember them as good. How many stories do we know?
So today, we compose memorial books, with sympathy for our ancestors – it is hard to deny people the right to specified activity. any of these items are read with pure pleasure, others with pain, specified as literature. any of them can be learned, but others obscure the fact – even if they represent a actual story, they do not take into account the wider geographical, social, cultural and historical context. They do not include, due to the fact that they cannot, it is not the author's bad will, he has specified a alternatively different household memory, and not everyone approaching the novel, script, or memories must have previously conducted a deeper study.
Magical Realism NIKE
We've got quite a few novels like that. Przemysław Czapliński, in 1 of the editions published by the Wyborcza Gazeta Wyborcza “Magazyn Book” lists respective of them. The author’s attention to the “human phrase in literature” deserves, among another things, "Piper" by Marian Pilot of 2010 or later by 4 years fresh “Sońka” Ignacy Karpowicz.
The first mentioned is simply a communicative set in postwar times, from the position of a peasant house. The main character is simply a boy from a poor, agrarian family. The illiterate father, conflicts with the teacher, steals and destroys the school board, and for that he is declared an “enemy of the people” and yet imprisoned in Stalin’s prison. parent and boy must face the consequences of this situation – there are many applications, efforts for justice, and this experience builds in the boy a cult of written word and a desire to advance society against agrarian and other, little traditional, elites.
Karpowicz's fresh is simply a communicative with a large emotional load, stories intertwined by war, memory and relations between generations. The title Sońka is simply a female from agrarian parts of Podlasie who survived the war, but her life since “that moment” is marked: war and trauma make quite a few what was her regular life cease to exist. The action is developed by an accidental gathering of Igor – a manager from the city – who is unexpectedly “out of reach”, in a agrarian environment. Igor becomes a listener of Sońka: she tells him her communicative – love, its consequences, past, war, tradition. The communicative mixes the present with the past, reality with reflection, memory with images, emotions with silence.
As you can see, these are many stories, but present by critics "knowing how it is", including the mainstream of "the folk return in literature". Focused around the “Gazeta Wyborcza” critics have been promoting this phrase for years, noticing it with hope besides in places where it is improbable to be present. I dare to think that a amazing nomination and then the main prize NIKE 2020 for Radek Cancer She was expected to be that kind of hope. The author represents the mocked and marginalized so far in the mainstream branch of literature, i.e. fantasy, present – teaching – called magical realism. Cancer wrote a thick volume entitled “A fairy tale with a serpent heart or the second word about Jacob Shela” and it was it that made the author of fantasy for the first time in the past of the 3rd Polish Republic so prestigious in literary circles.
This fresh balances between past and myth, giving a imagination of the destiny of James Shela (a spelling as in this novel) – the leader of the Galician robbery of 1846. And it is indeed, according to the title, a fairy tale. The reality of the peasant's life – including, of course, the mandatory beating of your whip, the work on the ground, social inequality, the relation between you and the subordinate people – intertwined with fantastic elements: talking snakes, underground lands, legends and magic.
In “Fair” we observe young Kóba Shela – his childhood, his grandfather's upbringing, dreams, fantasies, first sufferings – and all this before he became the icon of the peasant rebellion. There is simply a love theme: Malwa, whose Koba gives her heart, and the hebrew Chan – their fates fit into the context of the social and cultural tensions of Galicia. Cancer gives the reader space for explanation – it does not impose 1 version, alternatively building an atmosphere full of contradictions, the beast of human nature, class conflict and the forces of rebellion.
I don't think the author's intention is to bleach I didn't get that story. Neither this Shela Radka Raka is clearly a affirmative hero, nor are his oppressors clearly evil. And it's not about robbery at all, it's about fantasy, bad spirits, bad powers. However, I am convinced that the reasoning of the jury had to follow the following path: fantasy reads the masses, and since individual wanted to remind the masses of Shela, mention and reconstruct any part of Poles this figure and its associated idea, the NIKE environment had to remove prejudices and award to the author outside his own ellipse of common adoration.
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Missing Jacob S.
And Jacob Shela is indeed a perfect example for those who want to incite social unrest present and turn people against each other, possibly against their own national identity. After all, our identity is connected with the deep-rooted cultural genotype of Poles longing for palaces, castles, manor houses, nobility, order, hierarchy, nature, farm. That's the kind of stuff we've read about so far, that's where we grow up, even if in our household in erstwhile generations no 1 has always even passed the manor. We inactive miss you today, although the planet has long died, each of us can mention the noble names of Sienkiewicz's heroes. And erstwhile we want to laughter at ourselves, of our ancestors, we place a place of action of comedy – yes – in the village, but 1 which is owned by a nobleman with ambition, John Paul Adamczewski from The series "1670".
James Shela, many years after that date, personally fucked and urged to fuck descendants of specified Adamczewski and Kmicić, Volodyjowski and Zaglobów.
So he had to look forward to his spectacle today. And yes, in 2014, 1 of the Krakow theatres exhibited a play: "In the name of Jacob S.". It was written by Paweł Demirski, directed by Monika Sczępka. Later the performance was besides shown by television.
Again, this is not about the average biography of Shela or the reminder of a shameful, fratricidal episode of robbery. The title character becomes in this drama a symbol of peasant rebellion, but extends this subject towards modernity. As we read in the descriptions of this work, “the spectacle asks questions about identity, social class, roots, shame due to peasant background, and how modern problems – debt, credit, evictions, inequality – are in any sense the continuation of old forms of slavery (punishment).” Yes, it is not hidden, art is simply a criticism of class shame, of attempts to reject peasant origin by aspiring mediate class. The show shows that one's own origin cannot be easy rejected, and that in the social structure there are inactive tensions resulting from the heritage of the serenity. 1 can only wonder how it ends.
Jacob Shel at Strzęka/Demirski is possibly not an apostle of violence, but a figure of opposition – a symbol of the anticipation of opposing oppressive structures. Commentaries on the art of the creators said that it was “the recovery of Shela from black legendschoolIn which he was to be “presented as a primitive murderer.”
Wasn't he?
“We did terrible things”
In the same year, in which the premiere of the aforementioned performance was held in Krakow, a fresh was besides published – a fewer years later awarded Noble – Olga Tokarchuk. Of course “The Books of Jacob”In which the author is not so much inclined over the mediocre destiny of the Polish peasantry, but over a circumstantial branch of Polish Jews. The author is known for her many statements that put her into the current revolt against what we traditionally consider to be Polish, of which we feel pride – among others, from the past of the First Republic.
Among another things, her message echoed loudly: “We invented the past of Poland as a tolerant, open country, as a country that did not stain anything incorrect with its minorities. Meanwhile, we did terrible things as colonizers, the majority of the nation that suppressed the minority, as slave owners or murderers of Jews.”
The author has not yet written a fresh about Poles of anyone colonizing or about slave owners, but she has written a fresh affirming the judaic number – putting it together with the Polish nobles. And here, in the “James books” the image of the Polish nobility with a clear aversion: as a layer standing above another states, drawing from the tremendous political and economical privileges, dominant in public life and at the same time liable for stagnation and dissolution of the state. It contrasts its comfortable life, based on "your law" and exploitation, with the destiny of peasants deprived of subjectivity and with the despised Jews or Frankists. It shows both rich magnates and impoverished noblemen, grotesque drunkards and indebted losers who live off the illusions of old size. Tokarczuk wants to break the story of “golden freedom” by presenting the nobility not as a national elite but a parasitic class preserving inequality and clinging to empty rituals.
It is in her communicative that she is yet to exposure the false idyllic image of “Polish noble”.
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Cursed be the people!
At the beginning of the text, I mentioned that erstwhile writing “people stories” of their grandparents or further ancestors, not all novelist needs to survey different contexts. Olga Tokarczuk did not compose about her ancestors, reached far further into the past than only 2 or 3 generations, and made a immense investigation by writing an equally immense work. Still, she decided to present the nobility about as Jacob Shela saw her. And possibly Jacob Frank.
A good cognition of history, subtleties of cultural and social contexts, we anticipate people publishing on historical topics scientific, popular discipline or essays. It is impossible to mention in this text at least any of them which, in the field of "people's history", have arisen in fresh years.
And the list is truly impressive. Let's start with John Owl and his “Fantom body of the king” of 2011. The author puts the thesis that Poland has never undergone full modernity, due to the fact that its social and economical foundations were based on the state – a strategy which he calls the native form of slavery. Analyzing the past from the 16th century until the partitions, he tries to prove that the power of the Republic was based on the exploitation of peasant masses and the export of grain to the West, which, on the 1 hand, created an illusion of wealth, and on the another hand blocked the improvement of cities, towns and industries. Critics accused the Soviets of presenting Poland's past unilaterally, based on Marxist films, reducing the full past to combat classes and exploitation, and in search of analogy with post-colonial theories it besides easy fits Poland into the logic of the colonizer. Despite this criticism, the book has been widely regarded as a breakthrough and remains 1 of the key points of mention for investigation and discussion of folk past in Poland.
Almost a decade later, it appears “The Human past of Poland” by Adam Leszczyński (2020). The author traces the destiny of “work people” from the mediate Ages to the 21st century, showing how their lives have shaped almost exclusively violence, exploitation and subordination. He pays peculiar attention to yours, which he interprets as a strategy close to slavery. It may seem that Leszczyński brings the full past of Poland to the communicative of oppression and harm, disregarding affirmative aspects of noble culture or achievements of statehood. prof. Andrzej Nowak describes the comments to this book much better than I do – you can read our discussion on this subject in this edition of our quarterly.
A year later it appears ‘Chamdom’ by Kacpra Pobłockiin which the author wants to prove that the foundation of the relation between the Polish master and the peasant was not a patronage or a kind of caring power, but a brutal force – beating, whipping, humiliating and control of the subject body. In his view, the Polish village for centuries was a arena of systematic enslavement, and force became something so everyday and apparent that it simply grew into culture. Here, too, there are lists of slavery and colonizers. And the incomprehensible deficiency of another social and historical contexts.
In the same year besides Kamil Janicki publish a heading entitled ‘Penish. actual past of Polish Slavery”. The title itself says everything. Granted, any historians have pointed out that this popular-scientific book – although literaryly attractive – simplifies complex social processes to strengthen the author's thesis, but despite these voices, the "Pańszczyna" became a bestseller.
It is worth stressing again the function of the invaluable “Electoral Gazette” in this matter. Prior to the mass publication of the “Polish slavery”, Michnik's diary (more than 10 years ago) published a series of articles by Arkadiusz Pacholski on this subject – the titles talk for themselves: “How Poles dishonored Poles”, “Chata uncle chama”, “Turned into human cattle”.
These are just any of the positions to be mentioned here. With a somewhat different promotional strength – due to the fact that and dealing with somewhat different issues, not necessarily with equal hostility towards the gentlemen – we have besides talked about the following publications in the context of the “people's history”:
‘New Mother” by Marian Pilot (2012), essay on the village as “maciers” of Polishness based, among others, on the 17th century Liber chamorum Valerian Nekanda-Trepki.
– “The Dreamful Revolution” by Andrzej Leder (2014) – an analysis of the unconscious revolution of 1939–1956, erstwhile the Holocaust and agricultural improvement opened up space for class promotion. Leder claims that the modern mediate class is displacing its peasant roots.
– ‘Penish bastards. past of peasant rebellions” by Michał Rauszer (2020), a communicative of forms of peasant resistance, from regular opposition to open rebellions and protorevolutions. It is besides worth mentioning 2 another books of the same author – ‘Subordinated forces’ (2021), a description of the endurance strategy and opposition of subordinate groups, mainly peasants, and Human Anti-Clericalism (2023), describing "boyly opposition to the dominance of the Church and its oppressive function in the countryside".
– ‘Penish defenders’, another book already mentioned Adam Leszczyński (2023), about people and institutions who “legitimise the state by building its ideological foundations”.
– “In the footsteps of Shela, or Polish devils”Piotr Korczyński (2020), a book of Galician robbery and its leader, seen as part of folk tradition and resistance.
– "The Phantom. Natural History"Luke Cossack (2021), a survey of folk beliefs about ghosts as a metaphor of social exclusion and peasant memory.
It was a little, wasn't it?
“AntiPotop”
Such books read novelists and take the findings of historians as a good coin. But remember, we live in the 21st century, and it's not books that are the most crucial of the plays, but the film. He's the real 1 who gets to the masses, he's the 1 who truly affects them!
However, the authors of films are – to any degree – besides writers. For a movie to be made before anyone thinks about turning the camera on, a script must appear and scripts are written. It is besides based on what is read in scholarly books.
So did the authors of the film. "Kos". Let's turn it over to the director, Paul Buttercup, quoting from his interview from the weekly "Politics": “Kos” was born in the imagination of Michał A. Zieliński, who attacked me at the premiere of a historical movie and said that he wanted to make “western Kościuszkowski”. He had written a summary of the movie and the main assumptions – primarily the planet of heroes and the most crucial events. (...). I felt that there was a large possible to face the subject in the cinema, which simply demanded a message – a systemic, perpetuated for hundreds of years of force experienced by Polish peasants. Therefore, frequently erstwhile individual asked me what kind of movie I was doing, my first association was that it was the "Antipotop", due to the fact that in a sense our movie is the opposite, a collision with the Polish story about nobility Poland, which we were fed for years.
What cognition will the spectator from the screening “Kosa” who was advertised as a painting about Kościuszko? Well, he won't know the past of the Kościuszkowski uprising, he won't know how the destiny of the insurrections went, but he will surely see that everything in his cultural code rhymed with the word "nobility", is completely questioned in the film. Yes, the characters wear the same accounts as Hoffman's "Trilogy" and usage akin words as Sienkiewicz's characters, but have nothing to do with them. They are neither devout, nor chivalry, nor patriotic—they are a bunch of drunkards who, by God's command, hatred peasants and hound them in the worst possible ways.
The “Kos” is indeed the “Antipotop”. The same outfits, hairstyles and scarves, which erstwhile associated each Pole with Kmicic, Volodyjowski or Zagloba, are to associate with drunkenness, brutality, vileness, wickedness and animalism. This is how the surviving area sees Poland and Poles – identifying them with abomination, not feeling connected with either the nation or its tradition.
We will not find a decent nobleman in “Kosie”. All this social layer thinks only about food and money, peasants beat, rapes boys, shoots them for fun. Even erstwhile trying to communicate “for the sake of the common good”, he does it like a bunch of idiots. Only a planet man came from abroad, trying to direct them and give them meaning. And this is peculiarly meaningful: in Maslon the more intelligent than any Pole turn out to be Kościuszko – presented almost "half-American" – and Captain Dunin, a Russian officer. About the noble origins of Kościuszko himself, the movie is silent due to the fact that it would not fit the the thesis that any “tea” is simply a direct descendant of Lucifer or at best any monkey.
And we know that Sienkiewicz's communicative about nobles willing to give their lives for their homeland made erstwhile a peasant mass of Poles. We know the testimonies of the peasants, who clearly emphasized it. The movie adaptations of these stories strengthened the hearts of subsequent generations. Today, however, there is no time for any strengthening – present it is time to teardrop out the hearts of Polishness and fill them with hatred.
The gallows stand, who will hang there?
Long before the subject of Jakub Shela and the peasant revolt came to the center of intellectual debate in Poland due to books, films and performances, R.U.T.A. squad (Utopia Movement, Transcendence, Anarchy). Already in 2011, he released an album "Gore – Songs of rebellion and misery of the 16th–XXth century", on which he reached for authentic peasant songs of rebellion, including related to the Galician robbery. These old lyrics, full of anger and desire for retaliation, were played in a disturbing, punk-folk arrangement—with guitar acuity, drums, but besides utilizing traditional, seldom utilized instruments today.
The album featured songs whose lyrics were not afraid. Here are any of them:
“With whips on the men, hajduks off! all jerk present wants to shoot you in the head with a bar.”
“I am not afraid of you, nor of his court, / The Lord is afraid of peasant opposition today.”
“I would have done it to you, gentlemen, not with the role, / You will not have adequate of the ox — go into the yoke!”
“When the blood of the lords runs down the village, / It’s the boy of a bitch who will laugh, you cry too.”
“Gore, gore, peasant dola, / The court function is on fire.”
"Behind the court, behind the court, The gallows stand / Who will be hanging there / Economs with carbon.”
In case you have any doubts, I service the songs from this album: Zew Hord, how old-fashioned was that, Gore! The gallows stand, the prince of the pulpit, the peasant lament, You'll be alone mowing meadows, As an entree, I'm not afraid of you, I'd love to have you, Hey Reverend brother, They tied me in a rope, out! With whips on you, kill us, lord, heifer, the song of Jacob Shela, the song of the forest workers of Warmia.
The album "Gore", as the creators and critics emphasized, was not only a musical project, but besides a political and artistic gesture: he reminded that in Polish culture there is "an undeveloped tradition of the anger of the lower classes, and the past of peasant harm is not a margin, but the foundation of the erstwhile society".
The Galician Robbery Memory Restoration Movement, as you can see, revolves very wide circles.
The remainder of the old world?
This is all more and more like preparing us – the full nation – to reject our past. And if we start hating our own story, sooner or later we'll learn to hatred ourselves. due to the fact that we have no another past than the 1 you're trying to disgust so much today.
But possibly there's something else.
Maybe not just about causing shame, but about awakening any vague longing for rebellion? Finally, songs from Shela's times sound like a call to this day – their radicalism, their simple anger can inspire the contemporary. possibly it's not just about literary fashion or musical experiment, but about the social request for rebellion: The peasant revolt of the 21st century. What else is caused precisely this way in America? Black Lives substance movement? What else is causating another Western states for their colonial past?
There is only 1 problem in Poland – we did not have a colony (so we should be told that we colonized Ukraine) and we did not hit blacks (so we request to scapologically prove that we had our own, own, peasant blacks, only whites).
All right, but who would the Polish people rebel against today? The old nobility is gone, there are no Comics or Zaglobs. Today's power is elected democratically, not hereditary. Rich people, banks and large corporations – yes, they do be – but in the vast majority they are not Polish, they do not grow out of our social order. So it is hard for the revolt of Polish peasants or the wider Polish people to turn against them.
But did nothing from the old planet truly survive? Is there not an institution that continued in the days of Shela and continues to this day? Who inactive has money, buildings, land? Which in all way is associated with Polishness and tradition?
Yes, there is simply a church. Priest. It is the figure that scrolls in R.U.T.A. songs, in books of “people's history”, in performances and films. A priest who inactive has authority, who is inactive connected with Poland, who reminds of the large past of the nation. He's the 1 who's the easiest mark today. It is the last memory of the old order.
And in fact, all day we are bombarded with information to disgust us with the Church and the clergy. In this communicative the priest is no longer a priest, a pastor, not a guardian of tradition, but an aggressor, a hypocrite, a rich man surviving at the expense of the faithful, a relic of the old world.
Is it just my opinion? Probably. possibly this full folk communicative is just a temporary fashion? Who knows, maybe. Somehow, however, I am haunted by the lyrics of 1 of the songs by the band RUTA, who I met while working on this essay. Here he is:
The priest from the pulpit has to turn
The priest from the pulpit has to turn
The priest from the pulpit has to turn
The priest from the pulpit has to turn
Priest, priest, what is this sermon?
When you see beautiful girls, you keep looking at them.
Priest, priest, what is this sermon?
When you see a small kid and you look at them all the time
The priest from the pulpit has to turn
The priest from the pulpit has to turn
The priest from the pulpit has to turn
The priest from the pulpit has to turn
Priest, priest from the pulpit
Yeah, give him dense bricks.
Priest, priest from the pulpit
Yeah, give him dense bricks.
The priest from the pulpit has to turn
The priest from the pulpit has to turn
The priest from the pulpit has to turn
The priest from the pulpit has to turn
Yeah, give him dense bricks.
During the Galician robbery, about 1,500 people were killed, including respective twelve priests.
When the “rebellious people” who were opposed to the hierarchicalness of society took power in France, the main victim of these folk hatchets, apart from aristocrats, were priests and supporting Catholics.
When the Bolshevik revolution caused by the "social inequality" led to communist power in east Europe and another parts of the world, thousands of priests and millions of people who wanted the priest's presence died.
Krystian Kratiuk
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That's what the KOS movie is silent about! Prof. Andrzej Nowak for Quarterly PCh24.pl
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