A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature [1 ed.] 9789004429611, 9789004429598

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A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature

Textxet studies in comparative literature General Editors Theo D’haen (University of Leuven) Karen Laura Thornber (Harvard University) Zhang Longxi (City University of Hong Kong) C.C. Barfoot (University of Leiden) Hans Bertens (University of Utrecht)

volume 93

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​tscl

A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature By

Grzegorz Moroz

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at http://​catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://​lccn.loc.gov/2020019183​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 0927-​5 754 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 2959-​8 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 2961-​1 (e-​book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

Acknowledgements vii



Introduction 1

part 1 Travel Writing Genres in Historical and Theoretical Perspectives 1

Travel Writing and Genres; Theories, Taxonomies and Perspectives 11 1 An Overview of Anglophone and Polish Travel Writing Taxonomies 11 2 Pan-​European Dichotomies and Affinities 33 3 Explaining Generic Tools Selected to Approach Travel Writing Diachronically 37

2 Anglophone and Polish Travel Writing in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 47 1 Neo-​Latin Tradition and Its Influence on English and Polish Travel Writing 49 2 From the Ars Apodemica to the Grand Tour 58 3 Polish and English Travel Writing in the Vernacular in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 61 3 The Crucial Eighteenth Century: the Birth of the Genres of the Travel Book and the Podróż 70 4

Travel Books and Podróże in the Nineteenth Century 95 1 British Romantic Travel Writing 95 2 Polish Romantic Travel Writing 103 3 British and American Travel Books in the Victorian Period 110 4 The ‘Generic Shift’ in Polish Travel Writing of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century 124

vi Contents

part 2 Two Case Studies of the Travel Narratives of Four British and Polish Twentieth-​Century Travel Writers 5 Parallaxes of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Ryszard Kapuściński 145 6 Belated Grand Tourists: Aldous Huxley and Jarosław Iwaszkiewcz 167 1 Aldous Huxley’s Along the Road as a Travel Book 169 2 Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and His Italian Travels 183

Conclusion 200



Works Cited 209 Index 223

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Acknowledgements I would like to particularly thank my two reviewers of the book’s first version submitted to Brill Publishers. Their precise comments and inspiring remarks have led me to make the second, final version of the book much more focused on the ‘international context’ in which Anglophone and Polish travel writing is implicated. And to Masja Horn, of Brill, for help and support throughout the process of publishing this book. I am also grateful and indebted to Peter Foulds from whom nothing escapes and who proof-​read the first version of this book, Dr Kirk Palmer for his careful edition of this book’s final version, and to Prof. Roman Krzywy for his consultations in the area of Latin and Greek terminology. An earlier version of a part of Chapter 5 was published as Grzegorz Moroz, Recontextualising Huxley: Selected Papers, Białystok:  Prymat, 2017. An earlier version of Chapter 6 was published as Grzegorz Moroz, “Parallaxes as Means of Organizing Memories in the Travel Narratives of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Ryszard Kapuściński”, Crossroads: A Journal of English Studies, 13, 2/​2016, 41–​53. I am grateful to the publishers, Prymat in Białystok and the English Department of the University of Białystok, for permission to use the material here.

Introduction Travel writing studies as an academic discipline developed only during the two final decades of the twentieth century, following in the wake of seminal, though methodologically diverse, works such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Paul Fussell’s Abroad:  British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980). Said’s work convinced many scholars that “travel books are to be taken seriously in order to understand the Epistemè of a certain civilization at a given time”,1 while Fussell’s study persuaded many others to treat travel books as “literary phenomena”.2 One of the fundamental issues of travel writing studies from the discipline’s beginnings has been that of taxonomy. Whereas there is almost universal agreement that all travel narratives exhibit traits of generic hybridity, the two key bones of contention are: whether travel writing encompasses only texts which are regarded as non-​fiction ones, and whether it should even be treated as a genre. These issues are further complicated by the fact that historically, travel narratives, before the birth of travel writing studies, were developing largely outside the scope of literary criticism and scholarship, with their rigid taxonomies and hierarchies. Therefore, the generic taxonomies which have been postulated by travel writing scholars over the last two decades are, at least to some extent, anachronistic. The main argument put forward in A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature is that, at the centre of travel writing in Anglophone and Polish literary traditions from the middle of the eighteenth century, there have been non-​fiction travel narratives the developments of which can be best analysed, understood, and compared if they are regarded as genres: the genre of the travel book in Anglophone literary tradition and the genre of the podróż (journey) in Polish tradition. In order to support this argument a set of theoretical assumptions has been applied and adhered to. The term ‘genre’ itself is used throughout this study in the manner following John Frow’s lucid Genre (A New Critical Idiom) (2013), where it is defined as a “specific organisation of texts with thematic, formal and rhetorical dimensions”; more specific than the notion of a “mode” and less specific than the one of “sub-​genre”.3 Frow

1 Guillaume Thouroude, “Towards Generic Autonomy, The récit de voyage as mode, genre and form”, Studies in Travel Writing, Vol. 13, No. 4, December 2009, 387. 2 Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars, New York, Oxford, 1980, 202–​215. 3 John Frow, Genre, London, 2006, 73.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004429611_002

2 Introduction relies on Hans Robert Jauss’s notion of a ‘horizon of expectations’ to convincingly argue that “[j]‌ust as genres form a horizon of expectations against which any text is read, so they are themselves subsumed within a broader horizon formed by a period’s system of genres”.4 Such a conceptualization of the notion of genre is applied here to a wide and nebulous field of texts known as ‘travel writing’ in English and podróżopisarstwo (travel writing) in Polish. Following such scholars as Jan Borm5 and Bożena Witosz6 travel writing is treated as a ‘supra-​generic category’, comprising “texts both predominantly fictional and non-​fictional whose main theme is travel”.7 So ‘travel writing’ thus understood encompasses quite diverse genres, both fictional as the travel novel and non-​fiction as the travel book or the guide-​book. This understanding of the term ‘travel writing’ is at odds with the general treatment of it by Anglophone travel writing scholars who also call it a hybrid genre but usually do not include fiction or guide-​books (except for some ancient exceptions like Homer’s Odyssey) within its scope. Another assumption made by many of them is that travel writing and travel books are, in fact, synonymous expressions.8 However, according to Borm, while travel writing is a wide supra-​generic category, the travel book should be treated as a genre and can be thus defined: “any narrative characterized by a non-​fiction dominant that relates almost always in the first person a journey or journeys that the reader supposes to have taken place in reality while assuming or presupposing that author, narrator and principal character are but one or identical”.9 Borm used his definition mostly synchronically to describe the generic situation of the travel book in Anglophone literature at the beginning of the twenty-​first century. In A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature it is applied diachronically to the development of the travel book as a genre in Anglophone literary tradition. So while Borm’s definition of the travel book is wide enough to allow us to include in this ‘genre’ such texts as the late ancient Itinerarium Egeriae 4 Frow, Genre, 76. 5 Jan Borm, “Defining travel: on the travel book, travel writing and terminology”, in Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Tim Youngs and Charles Forsdick, vol. iv (Approaches to Travel) London, 2012, 1. 6 Bożena Witosz, “Gatunki podróżnicze w typologicznym ujęciu genologii lingwistycznej”, in Wokół reportażu podróżniczego, ed. Dariusz Rott, Katowice, 2007, 14–​16. 7 Borm, “Defining travel”, 1. 8 See, e.g., Jonathan Raban, For Love & Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling 1968–​1987, London, 1988, 253–​254. Tim Youngs, “Travel Writing after 1900”, in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs, Cambridge, 139. 9 Borm, “Defining travel”, 4.

Introduction

3

or the medieval Travels of Sir John Mandaville, in this book the notion of the travel book as a genre is more restrictive and is limited to those travel narratives which started to be written in Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century, first predominantly by professional men-​of-​letters and novelists, such as Henry Fielding or Tobias Smollett—​the genre which replaced the earlier more nebulous category of ‘voyages and travels’. The term ‘travel book’ used here is therefore identical with what Carl Thompson, in his Travel Writing, referred to as ‘modern travel books’:  “the more self-​consciously ‘literary’ travelogues which begin to appear in the eighteenth century and which are today what many people regard as ‘travel writing’ or ‘travel literature’ ”.10 Following such Polish scholars as Burkot and Niedzielski, this book adopts the perspective that in the Polish literary tradition at the end of the eighteenth century there developed a genre known as the podróż (journey). These two genres, the travel book and the podróż will be shown to have been remarkably similar in the first half of the nineteenth century. They were genres of book length, predominantly non-​fiction, first person narratives of travel, developing to a large extent alongside other ‘self’ focused genres such as the novel or autobiography. The common roots and common ancestors of the travel book and the novel are shown through analyses of such texts as Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), which “is now a ‘novel,” but “in the eighteenth century it was a travel book and inspired a huge school of sentimental travel accounts”,11 while Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett are discussed as the ‘founding fathers’ of both novels and travel books as genres. It is argued here that in the second half of the nineteenth century the paths of development of the travel book and the podróż diverged. Both travel book and podróż writers at that time utilized a similarly wide spectrum of first person traditional narrative formats: a collection of letters, a diary, a memoir, a personal essay, a short story. The Anglophone travel book of the second half of the nineteenth century continued to grow in ‘generic stability’, and no single narrative format dominated to such an extent as to destabilize the genre as such, which is what happened with the Polish podróż. It should be noted, though, that this ‘generic stability’ of travel books written in English was achieved through accommodation of different narrative formats such as diaries, letters, memoirs, ‘straight stories’, collections of notes/​essays. The evolving ‘horizon of expectations’ for the genre among Anglophone readers and writers was based

10 11

Carl Thompson, Travel Writing, London, 2011, 202. Percy, G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, Lexington, 1983, 198.

4 Introduction on the understanding that the such writing is open to formal variety; however, what remained at its core and preserved its uniqueness and difference from other genres, such as the novel or the biography, was the predominantly non-​ fictional mode, the focus on the narrative persona and the journey(s) as its main theme. The rapid growth of the press—​daily and weekly newspapers—​ coupled with the relative weakness of the book market in the Polish context in this period, led to a situation in which the most prominent Polish novelists of the period, such as Józef Ignacy Kraszewski and Henryk Sienkiewicz, who were also the most prominent Polish travel writers, published not only their novels, but also their travel accounts in instalments in periodicals. Such narratives were usually called kartki z podróży do … (postcards from a journey to …) or listy z podróży do (letters from a journey to …), and these titles were preserved when these narratives were published later in book form, and the terms kartki z podróży do … and listy z podróży do … started to acquire generic status. Coupled with the disdain which many Positivist writers and journalists of this period had for the genre of the podróż as representing sentimental musings from and about far-​away exotic countries, this led to the situation when the term ‘podróż’ as a generic category gradually started to be used only in historical contexts. The disappearance of the podróż as a genre happened at the beginning of the twentieth century when, because of the growing popularity of the new journalistic genre of the reportaż (reportage), its travel variant, known as the reportaż podróżniczy (travel reportage), started to be promoted as a new generic term to include all types of first person, non-​fiction travel accounts; a successor of both podróż, and listy (kartki) z podróży do … Apart from the relatively short periods of the cataclysms of the Two World Wars and their immediate aftermaths, the genre of the travel book written in English has developed steadily over the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, alternating between reliance on traditional methods of representations of travel and the adoption of new literary conventions, such as Modernism or Post-​Modernism, and adapting to political, economic, social and cultural changes. Over the last one hundred and twenty years many important first person referential travel narratives in Polish have been written, which, according to Anglophone generic standards, are ‘travel books’ sensu stricto. Yet, the disappearance of the relatively stable generic category of the podróż led to a situation—​particularly well seen from the vantage point of Anglophone travel writing, with its stable, though formally varied, genre of the travel book—​of generic confusion among Polish travel writers, critics and scholars alike; confusion resulting mostly from the fact that the generic constraints imposed on the nascent genre of the reportaż podróżniczy were stricter than constraints on the podróż. This was mainly because of the stricter epistemological requirements

Introduction

5

placed upon journalists/​reporters. In this respect Polish travel writing with its heavy dependence on shorter forms published in newspapers and magazines was much more similar to developments observed by scholars in Italian (terza pagina) and Hispanic (crónica de viaje) travel writing, than to their Anglophone variant. Two distinct ways in which scholars and critics have managed to deal with this confusion can be distinguished. The first one—​which could be traced in the works of scholars like Czesław Niedzielski or Andrzej Rejter—​ treats reportaż podróżniczy as a genre which replaced podróż, and assumes that all first person non-​fiction travel narratives written in the twentieth and twenty first centuries could and should be regarded as belonging to this genre, while most non-​fiction travel narratives written earlier could be regarded as the proto-​reportaż podróżniczy. The second one, adhered to by Dorota Kozicka and Helena Zaworska, while not denying generic status to the reportaż podróżniczy, insists that there exist contemporary non-​fiction travel narratives which should not be included in the genre of the reportaż podróżniczy, mostly because of their authors’ lack of journalistic perspective, and/​or high literary standards, and that such travel narratives should be treated as podróże intelektualne (intellectual journeys) or eseje podróżnicze (travel essays). While this book is devoted to the diachronic and generic comparison of travel writing in two literary traditions, Anglophone and Polish ones, it employs a more general, transnational perspective, taking into account parallel developments that have taken place in other literary traditions in such languages as Italian, French, German or Spanish. Such an approach avoids the construction of a merely binary perspective, which could ultimately lead to the danger of perceiving the Anglophone tradition as ‘normative’ because of the sheer number of travel narratives published and the international character of the English language. Loredana Polezzi’s book Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation (2001), as well as the chapters devoted to Italian, Hispanic, Frencophone and Eastern European travel writing included in the recently published Cambridge History of Travel Writing (2019) have been particularly helpful in moving beyond the Anglophone/​Polish ­binary. This book is divided into two parts. The first part entitled “Travel Writing Genres in Historical and Theoretical Perspectives” consists of four chapters. The first chapter is devoted to an overview of approaches to the issue of genre(s) in the context of the development of travel writing studies over the last four decades, with the focus on an analysis of the views on generic issues presented by scholars of Anglophone and Polish travel writing. Moreover, the potential advantages and drawbacks of applying research tools of dichotomous taxonomies which have been put forward by various travel writing scholars—​such

6 Introduction as ‘literary/​scientific’, ‘sentimental/​scientific’, ‘Romantic/​Enlightenment’, ‘subject/​object oriented narratives’—​are approached. The second chapter gives an analysis of the development of travel narratives written within the English and Polish literary traditions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; similarities and differences between these two traditions are analysed in the context of the influences exerted on such narratives generated by Latin and Neo-​Latin generic conventions and rhetoric, the concepts of the ars apodemica and the Grand Tour, and the birth of scientific discourse. The comparisons in this chapter are not limited toAnglophone and Polish travel narratives of the period but are aided with examples and parallels from German, French and Italian travel writing. The third chapter is devoted to the development of non-​fiction travel narratives written in English and Polish during the eighteenth century; this period is considered absolutely crucial from the perspective of the central argument of the present study: that the genres of the travel book and the podróż crystallized during the second half of that century. The beginnings of these two travel genres are analysed in the context of the rhetoric of ‘the rise of the novel’, issues of generic hybridity, as well as synergy in friction between the ‘self’ oriented genres. The fourth chapter traces the diverging developments of the travel book and the podróż in the nineteenth century. It concentrates on attempts to account for the fact that the growing popularity of these genres in the Anglophone and Polish contexts in this period led to the travel book’s consolidation and ‘generic stability’, while the podróż ceased to be ‘generically cohesive’ and was to be superseded first by listy (kartki) z podróży do … and later by reportaż podróżniczy, a process which took place in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Part Two is entitled “Two Case Studies of the Travel Narratives of Four British and Polish Twentieth-​Century Travel Writers” and consists of two chapters which could be treated as ‘case studies’. In Chapter 5 Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Time of Gifts is compared with Ryszard Kapuściński’s Imperium and Travels with Herodotus. In Chapter 6 Aldous Huxley’s Along the Road is analysed against Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s Podróże do Włoch (Journeys to Italy). The key objective, apart from accounting for these books’ literary merits, has been to consider the differences resulting from the travel book’s stable generic status—​which travel writers like Huxley and Fermor enjoyed in comparison with the much more confusing and murky generic constraints tha travel writers like Kapuściński or Iwaszkiewicz were facing. A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature follows in the wake of such general historical surveys of travel writing as Carl Thompson’s Travel Writing or Tim Youngs’s Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, but it offers a thoroughly new approach to these issues because of the

Introduction

7

two perspectives it adopts: generic and comparative. The generic hypothesis—​ that historical developments of travel writing written in English and Polish are best analysed through the lens of such genres as the travel book, the podróż and the reportaż podróżniczy—​has allowed not only to conceptualize these developments more lucidly, but also to foreground the nature of these genres’ complex relationships and mutual influences with autobiography and the novel. The comparative method of analysis has allowed not only to ponder the similarities and differences between Anglophone and Polish travel writing, but also to raise the hypothesis that unlike the much more homogeneous, ‘universal’, and critically esteemed genre of the novel, non-​fiction first person travel narratives written in English and in Polish over the last two centuries have followed very different generic paths, largely because of the relative weakness of the Polish book market, and also because of critical disregard of travel writing’s literary angle, which lasted till the rise of travel writing studies as an academic discipline in the 1980s This hypothesis is tested and extended through reference to the analyses and conclusions put forward by travel writing scholars focusing on similar issues in travel narratives written in Germanic, Romance as well as in Eastern European languages.

pa rt 1 Travel Writing Genres in Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

∵

­c hapter 1

Travel Writing and Genres; Theories, Taxonomies and Perspectives This chapter has a tripartite structure. The first part is a critical survey of views and taxonomies proffered by Anglophone and Polish travel writing scholars on the issues of genre(s) in the context of travel writing. The short second part considers the problems of the feasibility of approaching travel writing from the perspective of a postulated pan-​European universality of dichotomies underlying various European national travel writing traditions. The third part, grounded in findings from the first two parts, offers a presentation and an the approach to the issues of genres in historically approached travel writing which will be applied to all the subsequent chapters. 1

An Overview of Anglophone and Polish Travel Writing Taxonomies

Carl Thompson, the editor of an important recent anthology of critical texts on travel writing, The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (2016), while describing the content of Part ii of his book, entitled “Historical Overviews”, simply states that it “provides a series of historical surveys tracing the evolution of travel writing as a genre over time and across cultures”.1 It would appear that Thompson finds the fact that travel writing—​in both historical (“over time”) and global (“across cultures”) perspectives—​is a genre so obvious and straightforward that the generic issue is not dealt with in the Companion at all. Part I of this book, entitled “Key Debates and Critical Approaches”, contains nine chapters dealing with travel writing studies and travel writing from the perspectives of the truth versus lie issue, life writing, postcolonial studies, gender, sexuality, ethics, the visual culture, reception, and readership. The issues of genre(s) are not discussed explicitly in any of these, and travel writing is mentioned as a genre only in the chapter on sexuality and only ‘in passing’ and with the same assumption that Thompson adopted in the Introduction, even though the chapter bears the ‘generic’ subtitle “Queering the Genre”.

1 Carl Thompson, “Introduction” in The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Carl Thompson, London and New York, 2016, k.l. 364–​365.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004429611_003

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Chapter 1

Another anthology of travel writing scholarship, also published by Routledge, four years earlier, is more helpful from the generic perspective. It is entitled Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, and was edited by Tim Youngs and Charles Forsdick. The first part of Youngs and Forsdick’s Introduction to their four volume travel writing anthology is entitled: “Travel writing as a genre”, and it opens with this generalization: Recent introductions to and surveys of travel writing criticism are almost united in their view that travel is a mixed form, composed of different genres and discourses, and produced at a variety of historical moments in a range of geo-​cultural contexts.2 Youngs and Forsdick did not go much beyond this very general summary of approaches to genre(s) prevalent in travel writing criticism, apart from their insistence on the support of John Frow’s view of the fluid and dynamic nature of genres which “actively generate and shape knowledge of the world”.3 However, Youngs and Forsdick included in their anthology two important texts on generic issues in Anglophone travel writing (characteristically enough, both of them were written by non-​Anglophone, French scholars): Jan Borm’s “Defining travel: on the travel book, travel writing and terminology”, which had first been published in an earlier book of travel writing criticism: Perspectives on Travel Writing (2004), edited by Glenn Hooper and Tim Youngs. And Joan-​Pau Rubiés’s “Travel writing as a genre: facts, fictions and the invention of a scientific discourse in early modern Europe”, originally published in the first, 2000, issue of Journeys: the International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing. Despite important differences in the theoretical approaches between these two texts, Rubiés’s might be called ‘diachronic’, while Borm’s might be described as ‘synchronic’, their treatment of travel writing from the generic perspective bears important similarities. One of these similarities is crucial from the perspective of the present study: both Rubiés and Borm operate within the same European paradigm, transcending boundaries of national literatures. Rubiés in his paper draws on examples from European early modern travel writing in French, English, German, Portuguese and Spanish, while Borm, creating a taxonomy

2 Tim Youngs and Charles Forsdick, “Introduction”, in: Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, The Production of Travel Writing, ed. Tim Youngs and Charles Forsdick, vol. I (The Production of Travel), London, 2012, 1. 3 John Frow, Genre: The New Critical Idiom. Quoted in: Tim Youngs and Charles Forsdick, “Introduction”, in: Travel Writing, 2.

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of Anglophone travel writing, draws explicitly and implicitly from French and German travel writing and travel writing criticism. Borm explicitly states that from his perspective the terms ‘travel writing’, ‘travel literature’ and ‘literature of travel’ are synonymous,4 while Rubiés in his paper switches freely between ‘travel literature’ and ‘travel writing’, and treats them as synonymous, without, however, explicitly stating it. Borm states that travel writing “is not a genre, but a collective term for a variety of texts both predominantly fictional and non-​fictional whose main theme is travel”.5 For Rubiés, travel literature “can be defined as that varied body of writing, which whether its principal purpose is practical or fictional, takes travel as an essential condition for its production”.6 Both these definitions share three important features. Firstly, they treat (or seem to treat) travel writing as more than a genre, “a variety of texts” for Borm, a “varied body of writing” for Rubiés. However, in this aspect they also vary quite considerably. For, whereas, Borm’s decision to treat travel writing not as a genre is explicitly stated and rigorously carried out, Rubiés’s stance is not so unequivocal. While summarizing his musings on the nature of travel literature, Rubiés states that it “is therefore best described as a ‘genre of genres’, since a variety of kinds of literature defined by a variety of purposes and conventions share travel as their essential condition of production”.7 Thus, for Rubiés, despite its varieties of kinds, purposes and conventions, travel writing is, after all, a genre, though it is a ‘genre of genres’ and he has “Travel Writing as a Genre” for the title of his paper. Secondly, both Borm and Rubiés include not only non-​fictional, but also fictional texts in the category of travel writing, a move going against the dominant trend in Anglophone literary criticism.8 Thirdly, both Borm and Rubiés make ‘travel’ an essential notion of ‘travel writing’, as its “theme” (Borm) or an “essential condition for its production” (Rubiés). Yet it should be added here that for Rubiés, who

4 Borm, “Defining travel: on the travel book, travel writing and terminology”, in Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Tim Youngs and Charles Forsdick, vol. iv (Approaches to Travel), London, 1–​2. 5 Ibid., 1. 6 Joan-​Pau Rubiés, “Travel writing as a genre: facts, fictions and the invention of a scientific discourse in early modern Europe”, in: Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Tim Youngs and Charles Forsdick, vol. ii (The Contexts of Travel), London, 357. 7 Ibid., 357. 8 See, e.g., the scope of two recent Routledge ‘anthologies’ of travel writing criticism referred to in this chapter, or equally recent introductions to travel writing: Carl Thompson Travel Writing (2011) and Tim Youngs Travel Writing (2013). It should be noted at this point that some Polish scholars have also expressed doubts as to whether travel writing should encompass fictional texts with travel as their main theme (see, e.g., Krzywy, Od hodoerporikonu, 20).

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Chapter 1

was oriented less towards literature and more towards the history of ideas, the notion of ‘travel’ as a ‘theme’ is not precise and wide enough, and he insists on the notion of travel as an ‘essential condition for the production’ of travel writing. In a statement somewhat uncannily directed against the notion of ‘travel’ as a ‘theme’ in travel writing (uncannily because Borm published his paper four years later), Rubiés declares: Travel is therefore not necessarily a theme, not even a structuring element, within the body of literature generated by travel. For example, the historical narrative of conquest overseas written in the sixteenth century by the Portuguese or the Spanish, or the cosmographical descriptions of the same period, made use of materials collected by Europeans who had travelled but did not necessarily dwell on a description of their personal adventures and observations: the crucial point is that the writer, who could easily be an armchair writer, ultimately relied on the materials and authority of first-​hand travellers.9 Ultimately however, it is a matter of little consequence, if one—​having agreed that travel writing incorporates a huge variety of texts, fictional or non-​ fictional, for which travel is a condition of their production—​declares, as Jan Borm does, that it is “not a genre, but a collective term for a variety of texts”, or as Jean-​Pau Rubiés does, that it is “a genre of genres”. Generic taxonomies are based on more or less arbitrary hierarchies of categories/​levels traditionally referred to as sub-​generic, generic and supra-​generic. And that seems to be the case here. For Borm, travel writing is already a supra-​generic category, while for Rubiés it is still a generic one. Bożena Witosz, while generically surveying the field of gatunki podróżnicze (travel genres) from the perspective of Polish literary tradition, comes to conclusions which are similar to Borm’s position in that the field of travel writing consists of rodzina gatunków podróżniczych (a family of travel genres).10 These genres are, according to Witosz, of different hierarchical orders (sub-​generic, generic, supra-​generic), and it is the theme of travel that is the decisive factor in putting them together. These genres display a range of similarities, which can be analysed in terms of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of Familienähnlichkeit ‘family resemblance’.11 9 10

Rubiés, “Travel writing as a genre”, 357. Bożena Witosz, “Gatunki podróżnicze w typologicznym ujęciu genologii lingwistycznej”, in Wokół reportażu podróżniczego Tom 2, ed. Dariusz Rott, Katowice, 14. 11 Ibid.

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Jan Borm argues that a similar distinction should be made in Anglophone travel writing, which is traditionally made in reference to French and German travel writing. Thus, on the one hand, we have an overall thematic category (and not … a genre) that includes works of non-​fiction and fiction12 ‘travel writing’ in English, le littérature de voyage in French, Reiselitatur in German, and podróżopisarstwo in Polish. On the other hand, we have the (predominantly) non-​fictional, referential genre of ‘travel book’ in English, récit de voyage in French, Reisebuch (Reisebericht) in German. In the Polish literary tradition such a role could be assigned to the category of podróż (journey). It should be stressed once again that the predominantly non-​fictional, first person, referential narratives are regarded in all European literary traditions as the ‘hard core’ of travel writing, and that in some traditions—​like the Anglophone —​‘travel writing’ and ‘travel book’ (or their equivalents in other languages) are often treated as synonymous (from Raban, 1981 to Youngs, 2019), especially in the case of texts written over the last two hundred years of so, even though such a situation is only rarely confirmed explicitly. Borm proposes the following definition of the travel book:  “any narrative characterized by a non-​fiction dominant that relates (almost always) in the first person a journey or journeys that the reader supposes to have taken place in reality while assuming or presupposing that author, narrator and principal character are but one or identical”.13 Borm’s paper and definitions represent the ‘synchronic approach’ and deal with the generic issues within travel writing from a contemporary perspective. Scholars like Joan-​Pau Rubiés and Mary Baine Campbell have dealt with Anglophone travel writing generically and diachronically. However, to the best of my knowledge the diachronic approach to the problems of the travel book as an Anglophone literary genre was introduced only in my Travellers, Novelists and Gentlemen: Constructing Male Narrative Personae in British Travel Books, from the Beginnings to the Second World War (2013). In this book I argued that the beginnings of the travel book as a genre in the British literary tradition can be located in the middle of the eighteenth century, and that these beginnings coincided (and were, in fact, intricately connected) with the beginnings of another literary genre: the novel. I postulated that ‘the rise of the travel book’ (to paraphrase Ian Watt’s famous phrase The Rise of the Novel) was the result of a shift in literary conventions driven by the social and economic changes Britain was going through in this period, and particularly with the spread of literacy, the growing professionalization of the

12 Borm, “Defining travel”, 5–​6. 13 Ibid., 4.

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book market and its authors, and the birth of celebrity culture. In Travellers, Novelists and Gentlemen I argued that texts such as Henry Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), and Tobias Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766) should be treated as the earliest examples of the genre of the travel book, while the predominantly non-​fictional, first person narratives describing ‘real’ journeys that had been written prior to them, all the way from Horace’s “Iter Brundisium” (42 b.c.), through Egeria’s Itinerarium Pergrinatio (4th century a.d.) and Walter Raleigh’s The Discovery of Guyana (1595) to William Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World (1697), should be treated as ‘pre-​travelogues’.14 Generally, my reasoning went along the road of theorizing the travel book in a generic manner parallel to the road the genre of the novel had been earlier theorized about by a whole range of Anglophone scholars of the novel, from Ian Watt to Michael McKeon.15 While assigning a pivotal role to Henry Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon in the development of the travel book as a genre, I  became aware that different scholars had ‘used’ the text’s ‘singularity’ and generic hybridity to construct very different literary theories. Charles L. Batten, Jr., in a paper entitled “Literary Responses to Eighteenth-​Century Voyages”, in a disparaging and ironic manner referred to two interpretations of Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, a text published posthumously in 1755. Fielding’s book uses first person narration, and describes the travails of an ailing narrative persona keen to get to Lisbon, hoping to improve his health there. The bulk of the narrative consists of descriptions of frustrations connected with being forced to wait for the wind to change for some eight weeks while being mistreated by innkeepers and ship crews in ports on the south coast of Britain. It is only on the very last page of the narrative that Fielding’s persona reaches Lisbon. Henry Fielding died in Lisbon on 8 October 1854, two months after arriving from London. Batten first questioned the statement made by the German scholar, Hans-​ Joachim Passin, that the main theme in English eighteenth-​century travel 14

15

In the manner, analogous to the one used in dealing with the history of the novel as a literary genre, where terms such as ‘pre-​novel’, ‘pre-​novel narrative’, ‘proto-​novel’ are used, I made use of the fact that the terms: ‘travel book’ and ‘travelogue’ are used as synonyms by many travel writing scholars, therefore, for ‘topographical’ reasons, I introduced the term ‘pre-​travelogue’, instead of the more logical, but cumbersome and potentially confusing, ‘pre-​travel book’. The confusion, in my opinion, might be the result of connecting with a hyphen the compound, unhyphenated term ‘travel book’, the resulting ‘pre-​travel book’ might be understood as a book written in a ‘pre-​travel’ period, rather than a travel book was written before the era of ‘travel books proper.’ (see Moroz, Travellers, Novelists and Gentlemen, 19–​38). See, e.g., Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–​1740.

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accounts was that of “ʻthe exemplary quest’ in which the hero or narrator searches ‘for possible means of self-​knowledge and self-​realization’ ”.16 Batten accused Passin of over-​generalization and of “lumping together such generically disparate works as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Johnson’s Rasselas, and Smollett’s Travels”,17 and added sarcastically: “[f]‌rom such a critical perspective, the travel account indeed seems to be a subspecies of the Bildungsroman”.18 This sarcasm, of course, extends to Fielding’s Voyage of a Journal to Lisbon, where very few Bildungsroman elements can be discerned. Then, Batten turned to another interpretation of eighteenth-​century travel writing in general, and Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon in particular. Sonia Rosenberg’s line of reasoning was also found wanting: “Sonia Rosenberg claims that in form eighteenth-​century voyages and travels most resemble picaresque romances […] Such a view then leads Rosenberg to argue that Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon must be at least a “parody of voyage literature” since it is so boring and so unlike a picaresque novel”.19 Finally, Batten declared: “I believe that Possin and Rosenberg are seriously mistaken. […] In form eighteenth-​century voyages and travels are neither Bildungsromanen nor picaresque novels”.20 At the end of the chapter Batten presented his own position on eighteenth-​century travel accounts: While they may look like autobiographies, their primary subject matter is the countries visited—​not the experiences of the traveler. When a traveler mentions his experiences, they must always be subservient in importance to the countries being described.21 This statement of Batten can also as easily be made fun of, in a manner similar to the one in which he himself dealt with the declarations on the nature of voyages in travels by Passin and Rosenberg. The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon can be used as a paragon once again. Fielding’s narrative stops before the persona’s experiences can be made “subservient in importance to the countries being

16

Charles L. Batten, Jr., “Literary Responses to Eighteenth Century Voyages”, in: Background to Discovery:  Pacific Exploration from Dampier to Cook, ed. Derek Howse, Berkeley, 1990, 131. 17 Ibid., 132. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 132–​133. 21 Ibid., 153.

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described”, for the simple reason that there are no “descriptions of countries” in Fielding’s travel account as the journal stops at his arrival in Lisbon.22 So, as we have seen, the little travel account of an ailing Fielding has been seen as an important text located at the beginning of various literary movements/​phenomena. In the narration which I presented in Travellers, Novelists and Gentlemen, and which I would also like to adhere to in this book, Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon is the first ‘travel book proper’, soon followed by other professional men-​of-​letters, like, for example, Tobias Smollett or Samuel Johnson, who were keen to capitalize on the popularity of travel narratives (at that time still called ‘voyages and travels’), but also on their own, personal popularity as ‘literary celebrities’,23 as well as on their stylistic/​artistic skills to add “all kind of ornament of stile or diction, or even of circumstance”24 to their realistic accounts. So with Fielding and Smollett we had a discernible shift from ‘scientific’ to ‘sentimental’, to use the dichotomy coined by Pratt and later used by Blanton, a shift from ‘object oriented’ to ‘subject oriented’ travel writing, as Korte called it. It was no longer the journey itself which was focused upon, but the (often celebrity) narrative persona describing his/​her (often very inauspicious and ordinary) travels in elegant, smooth, ‘artistic’ language. This language ‘borrowed’ from the artistic/​novelistic style such elements as “free indirect style, scenic construction, present-​tense narration, prolepsis, iterative symbolism”.25 Within Polish literary tradition the first critical book which dealt extensively with travel writing and its genre(s), a book which was later referred to 22

I feel that it is indispensable, at this point, to try to do justice to Charles L. Batten, Jr. as a travel writing scholar. He should definitely be treated as one of the “pioneers” or “founding fathers” of the discipline which is now widely known as “travel writing studies”, largely because of the book Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth Century Travel Literature, published in 1978, two years prior to Paul Fussell’s Abroad. Pleasurable Instruction remains one of the most often quoted books in the field, and, in my opinion, very rightly so, for it lucidly describes the dynamics of the process of the shift from ‘instruction’ to ‘pleasure’ in eighteenth-​century travel literature (the shift that travel writing scholars would later call the shift from ‘scientific’ to ‘sentimental’ discourse. See, for example, Blanton Travel Writing: The Self and the World.). 23 I am consciously using these two words (celebrity novelists) here to describe the phenomenon, although I am aware of the ‘anachronistic’ character of both words. After all, the word ‘celebrity’ was first used in the middle of the next, the nineteenth, century, and it took many decades from the shaky start of ‘the novel’ in the middle of the eighteenth century for the genre to be firmly and stably established, and for the term ‘novelist’ to follow suit. Yet, from our perspective it is their status as ‘celebrities’ and ‘novelists’ that is crucial here. 24 Fielding, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Moscow, 1987, 161. 25 David Lodge, The Practice of Writing, London, 1997, 8.

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by generations of scholars who followed, is Czesław Niedzielski’s O teoretycznoliterckich tradycjach prozy dokumentarnej (podróż—​powieść—​reportaż). (On Theoretical-​Literary Traditions of Documentary Prose: podróż—​novel—​ reportage), which was published in 1966. The book was written from the position of what today is usually referred to (anachronistically) as ‘liberal humanist criticism’,26 and there is surprisingly very little in it of the Marxist criticism then dominant in Poland and which was even supposed to be obligatory. The book’s ‘liberal humanist’ essence lies, in my opinion, in the fact that it is written with the conviction of the superiority of ‘artistic’ genres, such as the novel or lyric poetry, over the ‘documentary’ (non-​fictional) genres.27 This superiority, being the result of a conviction in the clear and undoubted hierarchy of the genres, was felt to be so obvious that most scholars did not bother to comment on it or explain it, as is the case with Niedzielski and his book. Niedzielski is not concerned with the change, the growth of status of the novel as a genre in the period from its beginning in the Polish literary tradition, i.e. from the end of the eighteenth century to the period contemporary to him. His book is a detailed and widely researched study of the mutual influences between various ‘documentary’ narratives (including novels) written in Poland over two centuries (roughly 1760s-​1960s). The opposition Niedzielski constructed in his book is between two types of ‘documentary prose’: ‘artistic’ prose (the novel, the short story) and ‘non-​artistic’ prose (podróż, reportage, and many other short ‘journalistic’ forms).28 These two are not treated as equal: It [the novel] is, in a way, an appeal tribunal of all aesthetic reflections connected with external, social functions, but also with artistic values of different genres of prose. It could also be stated that in the moment of social affirmation of literary qualities of the novel and the appearance of an independent theory of this genre, the literary sense of these documentary forms could be supported […] The role of it [the novel] is superior not only because of its received position in the hierarchy of forms purely literary, and its generic conventions. The superiority of this place is particularly clearly seen when we remain on the level of documentary forms.29 26 27

See, e.g., Barry Beginning Theory. Czesław Niedzielski, O teoretyczno-​literackich tradycjach prozy dokumentarnej (podróż-​ powieść-​reportaż), Toruń, 1966, 6–​8. 28 Ibid., 6. 29 Ibid. “Jest [powieść] poniekąd trybunałem odwoławczym wszelkiej refleksji estetycznej dotyczącej tak funkcji zewnętrznych, społecznych, jak i jakości artystycznych różnych gatunków prozatorskich. Można także powiedzieć, że właściwie w momencie społecznego usankcjonowania literackich jakości powieści i pojawienia się samodzielnej teorii

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Niedzielski himself did not use the term ‘genre’ to refer to podróż, or reportage (reportage). For him they were types of formy dokumentarne (documentary forms).30 Yet, when he presented the critical discussion on generic issues which occasionally appeared throughout the nineteenth century, he also presented the positions of such writers as Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, who treated podróż as a genre.31 When Niedzielski tackled the theoretical and historical issues connected with various ‘documentary forms’ he stressed that they are much more generically ‘fuzzy’ and changeable than the novel:  “their evolution is relative and interrupted”.32 He stated that the term podróż used in the sense of literary narratives about journeys (real or fictitious) is a short version of the term opis podróży or opisanie podróży (description of a journey).33 Niedzielski added that opis podróżniczy “is not only a report of instantaneous individual observations, but also a generalizing cognitive narrative, defining the subject’s attitude to reality. Such a concept was created in the period of the Enlightenment, and it has survived in this way till the present day”.34 When Niedzielski approached the term reportaż he stated that it can be chronologically located at the end of various ‘documentary forms’, and tego gatunku mógł się również uwierzytelnić literacki sens form dokumentarnych […] Przypada jej miejsce nadrzędne nie tylko ze względu na jej uznaną pozycję w hierarchii form ściśle artystycznych, na jej konwencje gatunkowe. To miejsce nadrzędne jest szczególnie wyraziste, gdy pozostaje się na gruncie form dokumentarnych”. The translation from Polish of this (and other fragments from Polish) has been done by the author of this book. 30 In Niedzielski’s book, as we can see from its very title, the genre of the novel is also treated as ‘documentary’, O teoretycznoliterackich tradycjach prozy dokumentarnej (podróż—​ powieść—​reportage) (On Theoretical-​ Literary Traditions of Documentary Prose (podróż—​novel—​reportage). However, at the same time, as we have seen in the quotation above, Niedzielski distinguished the ‘artistic’ genre of the novel from ‘documentary forms’, because of its “social affirmation of literary qualities”. 31 It is interesting to note that for Kraszewski podróż is an ‘artistic’ genre through the fact that it is an account “with a figure of an artist in the foreground”, (“z figurą artysty na pierwszym planie”) [J.I, Kraszewski, Listy literackie, quoted in Niedzielski, O teoretycznoliterackich, 70]. So, Kraszewski, in the middle of the nineteenth century, pointed to this foregrounding of an artist in the (non-​fictional) narrative as a central generic issue, preceding in this by more than a whole century those Anglophone scholars who constructed the category of ‘sentimental travel books’. 32 Niedzielski, O teoretycznoliterackich, 9. “ich ciąg ewolucyjny jest względny i przerywany”. 33 Ibid., 11. 34 Ibid. “W tym też sensie opis podróżniczy nie jest jedynie relacją z momentalnych obserwacji jednostkowych, ale także uogólniającą wypowiedzią poznawczą, określającą stosunek podmiotu do rzeczywistości. Taką treść związało z pojęciem opisu podróżniczego Oświecenie i w takim znaczeniu dotrwało ono do czasów nam współczesnych”.

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“commonly its twentieth-​century origins are pointed to”.35 “However,” added Niedzielski: it could be assumed that reportaż is a name for such generic phenomena the genealogy of which goes much further back in time. A change of the meaning of terms, their terminological functions, indirectly testifies to the dynamism of changes in the shape of forms of writing and in the range of their external functions. However, it does not disqualify the possibilities of reconstructing common and comparable generic features.36 In this way Niedzielski established the whole tradition of Polish literary scholars of treating reportaż (reportage) in general and reportaż podróżniczy (travel reportage) in particular as also referring to travel accounts written before the twentieth century—​texts which exhibit the features assigned to ‘reportage’ in the twentieth century. A  recent example of this phenomenon is a paper by Leszek Zinkow entitled “U początków polskiego reportażu—​Maurycy Mann” (“The Beginnings of Polish Reportage—​Maurycy Mann”) (2009). Zinkow explains his main argument in the summary which precedes his text: The debate about the beginnings of the form of reportage in the Polish literary tradition is open, and the pinpointing of the “first” text representing this genre remains a contentious issue. In this context the extensive account of the journey to the Middle East (particularly Egypt) in the years 1852–​1853 by Maurycy Mann, a journalist of the Cracovian newspaper Czas, is underestimated and almost forgotten. It was published by this daily from 1853, and was soon published in book form (twice). The structure of this text, the stylistic tools and other markers of the genre allow us to recognize in Listy ze Wschodu (Letters from the East) one of the first—​and also surprisingly formally mature—​Polish reportages.37 35 36

37

Ibid., 5. “powszechnie wskazuje się na jego dwudziestowieczną proweniencję”. Ibid. “Można jednak przyjąć, że ‘reportaż’ jest aktualnie nazwą dla takich zjawisk gatunkowych, których genealogia przekracza daleko granice naszego stulecia. Zmiana zakresu nazw, ich funkcji terminologicznych, świadczy pośrednio o dynamice w kształcie form piśmienniczych i w zakresie ich funkcji zewnętrznych. Nie przekreśla jednak możliwości rekonstruowania wspólnych i porównywalnych cech gatunkowych”. Leszek Zinkow, “U początków polskiego reportażu—​Maurycy Mann”, Rocznik Historii Prasy Polskiej vol. xii/​2, 2009, 136. “Dyskusja nad początkami formy reportażowej w polskim piśmiennictwie jest otwarta a wskazanie ‘pierwszego’ tekstu reprezentującego ten gatunek pozostaje kwestią sporną. W tym kontekście niedocenioną, bodaj niemal zapomnianą, pozostaje obszerna relacja z podróży po Bliskim Wschodzie (zwłaszcza Egipcie) odbytej w latach 1852–​ 1853 przez dziennikarza krakowskiego

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Niedzielski himself went even further back in time and claimed that the genetic and structural similarities of podróż and konstrukcje reportażowe (reportage construction) could be argued from Jan Potocki’s Podróż do Holandii (A Journey to the Netherlands) (1787) and Jezierski’s Podróż po Polsce (A Journey in Poland) (1791) through Kraszewski’s Obrazy z życia i natury (Pictures from Life and Nature) (1842) and Sienkiewicz’s Listy z Ameryki (Letters from America) (1876–​1878).38 While discussing some of the ‘artistic’ travel accounts written in the twentieth century, such as Zbigniew Uniłowski’s Żyto w dżungli (Rye in the Jungle) (1936) or Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s Książka o Sycylii (A Book on Sicily) (1956), Niedzielski stopped short of calling them reportaże podróżnicze, and used the more general, and non-​committal term relacja z podróży (travel ­account). When more than thirty years after the publication of his seminal book Niedzielski wrote an entry reportaż (reportage) for Literatura polska dwudziestego wieku: Przewodnik encyklopedyczny (Polish Literature in the Twentieth Century:  An Encyclopaedic Guide) (2000) he gave as examples of reportaż podróżniczy such books as: Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s Podróże do Włoch (Travels to Italy) and Podróże do Polski (Travels to Poland) or Jan Józef Szczepański’s Świat wielu czasów (The World of Many Times). Such a ‘radical’ position was challenged by Dorota Kozicka in 2003. Her polemics with the position of Czesław Niedzielski and the taxonomy she proposed will be presented later in this section. Between Niedzielski’s two texts, the one from 1966 and the one from 2000, travel writing studies became a discipline of its own, with most researches following in the wake of Niedzielski’s 1966 book, though not necessarily agreeing with the taxonomy proposed there. For example, Stanisław Burkot in Polskie podróżopisarstwo romantyczne (Polish Romantic Travel Writing) (1988) claimed that the podróż could be treated as a genre because it has “its own rules of poetics”. However, he felt bound to add that it was

„Czasu“  —​Maurycego Manna. Publikowana była na łamach tego dziennika już od 1853 roku, rychło wydana także w postaci książkowej (dwukrotnie). Konstrukcja tekstu, instrumentarium stylistyczne oraz inne wyznaczniki gatunku, pozwalają nam rozpoznać w Listach ze Wschodu jeden z pierwszych—​i to zaskakująco dojrzały formalnie —​polskich reportaży”. Mann’s Listy ze Wschodu (Letters from the East) was not as underestimated and forgotten as Zinkow stated. For example, it was referred to many times in Burkot, Polskie podróżopisarstwo romantyczne. It will also be briefly referred to in Chapter 4 of this book. 38 Niedzielski, O teoretycznoliterackich, 55. “Genetyczna i strukturalna zbieżność dokumentarnego modelu podróży i konstrukcji reportażowych może być dowiedziona …”.

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a borderland genre, which, generally, could be treated as a part of non-​ fictional literature, although it sometimes freely transgresses this boundary, so that—​through the acquisition of new features, and through the blending of fiction and non-​fiction and other forms of writing—​it moves into the category of ‘Literature’.39 Roman Krzywy, however, in Od hodoerporikonu do eposu peregrynackiego: Studium z historii form literackich (From Hodoeporicon to Travel Epic: A Study in the History of Literary Forms) (2001) was more sceptical about its generic status: […]In critical literature podróż is treated in very different ways. Sometimes it is regarded as a type of literature, sometimes it is regarded as a type and a genre, and in some cases it is treated as just a genre. In this way podróż ‘gains’ the character of a term that is quasi-​generic and imprecise […]40 Most scholars have agreed with Niedzielski’s claim that although reportaż podróżniczy is a twentieth-​century phenomenon, its origin could (and should) be traced much further back. Apart from the chase for the chronologically ‘first travel reportage’, other important issues and problems connected with generic aspects of ‘travel reportage’ have also been foregrounded. Niedzielski himself, in an entry ‘reportaż’ in Słownik literatury polskiej xix wieku (A Dictionary of Polish Literature of the Nineteenth Century) stated that the reportaż was associated with “scandalizing information, with areas of pathology in social life, revealing indiscretions, spreading sensational news, […] it was associated with the low level, a symptom of the decline of the opinion forming role of a ­periodical”.41 39

40

41

Stanisław Burkot, Polskie podróżopisarstwo romantyczne, Warszawa: pwn, 1988, 6–​7. “[…] gatunku pogranicza, który mieści się w zasadzie w obrębie ‘literatury faktu’, choć dość swobodnie przekracza niekiedy tę granicę, by—​nabierając cech nowych, łącząc fakty z fikcją i odmiennymi formami wypowiedzi—​znaleźć się w obrębie literatury pięknej”. Roman Krzywy, Od Hodoeporikonu do eposu peregranackiego: Studium z historii form literackich, Warszawa, 2001, 9, “[…] w literaturze przedmiotu podróż traktowana jest bardzo rozmaicie, czasem uznaje się ją za tym literatury (piśmiennictwa), innym razem zarówno za typ jak i gatunek, a jeszcze innym—​tylko za gatunek. Tym samym nazwa podróż ‘zyskuje’ charakter quasi-​nazwy genealogicznej, nazwy nieprecyzyjnej […]”. Czesław Niedzielski, entry ‘reportaż’ in: Słownik literatury polskiej XIX wieku, wieku, ed. J. Bachórz and A. Kowalczykowa, Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1994, 821. “[…] z informacjami skandalizującymi, z obszarami patologii życia społecznego, ujawniającymi niedyskrecje,

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These lowly, negative associations connected with such terms as reportaż and reporter (reporter) in the second half of the nineteenth century, when these terms started to be used in Polish, were later confirmed by such scholars as Jolanta Sztachelska42 and Magdalena Piechota. Piechota quoted Sienkiewicz from Listy z podróży do Ameryki (Letters from a Journey to America): “reporters sometimes bring me erroneous information”43 and she added that in this period the difference between reporter (reporter) and literat (man-​of-​letters) was the difference in social status, and that it was sharply observed.44 It was only in the period between the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century that the reportaż podróżniczy in Poland quickly gained in status as a journalistic and literary form, and started to be assessed from critical and theoretical perspectives. This was the result of the theoretical shift in the assessment of the social value of literary genres, of the high evaluation of documentary forms against the supposedly ‘nebulous’ genres such as the novel which was carried out by the literary groups associated with the political left, such as the Russian formalists. In Poland the superiority of literatura faktu (non-​fiction literature) over earlier, ‘bourgeois’ literary forms like the novel was argued for, for example, by Aleksander Wat, who in an article entitled “Reportaż jako rodzaj literacki” (“Reportage as a Literary Genre”) (1930) claimed that reportage is a literary phenomenon being the result of the development of prose and journalism in the Early Modern Period. According to Wat, the structural features of reportage were to a certain extent the result of its journalistic features, but that it was influenced much more by piśmiennictwo podróżnicze (travel writing): The accounts about newly discovered or barbarian lands, beginning with the accounts of Vasco do Gama and Sir Mandeville from the fifteenth century (sic!), through numerous French Voyages, to reports of missionaries from China and India were already reportages.45

42 43 44 45

rozpowszechniającymi wiadomości sensacyjne[…] była odznaką niskiego poziomu, objawem spłycenia funkcji opiniotwórczej czasopisma”. See Jolanta Sztachelska, „Reporteryje“ i reportaże: dokumentarne tradycje polskiej prozy w 2 poł. XIX i na pocz. XX wieku (Prus, Konopnicka, Dygasiński, Reymont), Białystok, 1997. Henryk Sienkiewicz, Listy z podróży do Ameryki, Warszawa:  piw, 1986, 8.  “[…] czasami reporterowie przynoszą mi mylne fakta …”. Magdalena Piechota, Jaka Ameryka? Polscy reportażyści dwudziestolecia międzywojennego o Stanach Zjednoczonych, 2002, 8. Aleksander Wat, “Reportaż jako rodzaj literacki”, Miesięcznik Literacki, no.  7, 1930. “Reportażem były już o wiele wcześniejsze od gazet relacje o nowo odkrytych czy barbarzyńskich krajach poczynając od relacji Vasca de Gamy, sir Madeville’a z xv wieku,

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Thus, in fact Wat in this way equated such terms as relacja z podróży (travel account) with reportaż podróżniczy, for if the clearly fictitious account written by a most probably fictitious English fourteenth-​century knight originally written in Old French and entitled The Travels of Sir John Mandeville Book of Marvels and Travels could be recognized as a reportaż podróżniczy, then the question arises as to whether there have been any travel accounts ever written which would not pass this test.46 In the 1930s, despite the opposition to the high assessment of ‘literature of facts’ and ‘reportage’ by such eminent conservative critics as Karol Irzykowski, travel reportage quickly became very popular (both with readers and with some critics) and its stars became such journalists and writers as Melchior Wańkowicz and Ksawery Pruszyński. After the Second World War when, as a result of the Soviet oppression of Poland, Marxist criticism became the key and obligatory way of approaching literature, the ideological support of literatura faktu grew much stronger, launching such ‘travel reporters’ as Ryszard Kapuściński into literary fame, first at the national, and then at the international level. Strong support for the treatment of the reportaż podróżniczy as a crucial concept/​genre has come from a group of scholars from Uniwersytet Śląski (the University of Silesia), most of whom have a background in linguistics and in the study of the Polish language. In 2000 Artur Rejter published a book entitled Kształtowanie się gatunku reportażu podróżniczego w perspektywie stylistycznej i pragmatycznej (The Development of the Genre of Travel Reportage from the Stylistic and Pragmatic Perspectives). Rejter states in it that the reportaż podróżniczy is not a literary genre, but a gatunek mowy (speech genre),47 and that he considers the reportaż podróżniczy to be a gatunek użytkowy (utilitarian genre); that is why he states that in his selection of texts for analysis he

46

47

poprzez liczne francuskie Voyages i kończąc na sprawozdaniach misjonarzy z Chin i Indii.” The Travels of John Mandeville (La Livre des Marvilles du Monde, 1356) is now regarded by travel writing scholars as the epitome of late medieval fantastic and non-​realistic travel narratives. The author of this book (whose identity remains unknown, the eponymous character, Sir John Mandeville from St. Albans seems to be just his literary creation) was once famously accused of “having travelled not further than to the nearest library” (Michael C. Seymour, Sir John Mandeville, Rugby: Variorium, 23). On the role of Travels of John Mandeville in the development of the discourse of travel see, for example, Sebastian J. Sobecki, “Mandeville’s Thoughts of the Limit: The Discourse of Similarity and Difference in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville”. Andrzej Rejter, Kształtowanie się gatunku reportażu podróżniczego w perspektywie stylistycznej i pragmatycznej, Katowice, 2001, 7.

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includes only those in which the funkcja użytkowa (utilitarian function) is the dominant one, and skips those in which the funkcja estetyczna (aesthetic function) is dominant, as they belong to gatunki artystyczne (artistic genres). Rejter postulates three stages in the development of travel reportage as a speech genre. The first stage extends from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century and “is a preliminary phase in the development of the contemporary reportaż podróżniczy”.48 The second stage covers the nineteenth century. Rejter calls it crucial (przełomowy) because it was then that the list z podróży (letter from a journey) appeared as a speech genre, a genre which was “clearly related to the genres from the first stage”.49 Rejter adds that “this type of utterance already possesses features of texts with artistic characterization. Artistry is the fundamental stylistic determinant of texts from this stage of development”.50 According to Rejter, “genres representing both the first and the second phases may be called ‘proto-​reportage’ ones, because they concurred with the shape of contemporary reportage”.51 Rejter’s third phase, końcowy etap ewolucji (final stage of evolution) is the twentieth century, in which “reportage developed; a genre of speech which is fully independent, [and] reasonably homogeneous stylistically”.52 In Rejter’s book the key dichotomy he relies on to cope with the hybrid, borderland nature of the travel reportage is that of utilitarian versus artistic. I believe that this dichotomy is even more problematic than the ‘fictional versus non-​fictional’ dichotomy which is usually adhered to by literary scholars while coping with travel writing (and other hybrid genres, sub-​genres and supra-​genres); for the latter seems to be a more precise and useful tool, particularly when applied in the ‘minimalistic’ way to distinguish not ‘the real world’ from ‘the text’, but the notions of (non)fictionality as one of the key elements of a ‘generic contract’.53 Rejter, on the same page, first states that “texts in which the aesthetic function dominants have been discarded, because they are 48 Ibid., 8.  “[…] stanowi wstępny etap krystalizowania się dzisiejszego reportażu podróżniczego”. 49 Ibid. Kształtowanie się gatunku reportażu podróżniczego, 8.  “[…] wyraźnie pokrewny gatunkom z okresu pierwszego”. 50 Ibid., “[…] ta odmiana wypowiedzi nosi już znamiona tekstów o nacechowaniu artystycznym. Artyzm stanowi bowiem podstawowy wyznacznik stylistyczny przykładów z tego etapu rozwoju”. 51 Ibid., “Zarówno gatunki reprezentujące okres I, jak i ii można określić mianem prereportażowych, ponieważ złożyły się one na postać współczesnego reportażu”. 52 Ibid.,“[…] wykształcił się reportaż, w pełni samodzielny, w miarę jednolity pod względem stylistycznym gatunek mowy”. 53 See, e.g., Jan Borm’s reliance on the “non-​fictional dominant”. Borm, “Defining travel”, 4.

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undoubtedly located within a group of artistic genres”.54 But a paragraph later he declares that he has selected texts from the second period—​the one which covers the nineteenth century—​in which “artistry is the key stylistic determinant”.55 In his final conclusions Rejter claims that after the “excess of artistry over utility” (przerost artyzmu nad użytkowością) in listy z podróży written in the nineteenth century, a proper balance between artistic and utilitarian features was achieved in reportaż podróżniczy proper, written in the twentieth century.56 Rejter argues that texts written in the first period were ‘not artistic’ because they were not usually written with an intention of publishing them. The situation was to change in the nineteenth-​century listy z podróży, which were written for the mass audience, and required authors to use stylistic/​artistic features so as to be popular with readers. If we follow this trail, however, we might state that (almost) any text which is written to be published is written with considerable consideration for style, and thus becomes ‘artistic’ even though it is supposed to be ‘utilitarian’. It would also be difficult to agree with Rejter’s statement of the balance between ‘utilitarian’ and ‘artistic’ elements in ‘mature’ Polish travel reportage of the twentieth century, for the very reason that the number of examples of such texts he uses is very limited. Let us take, for instance, Ryszard Kapuściński, the most famous and analysed of Polish travel reportage writers of the twentieth century. Rejter quotes only one sentence, in fact the title of one chapter of Kapuściński’s early book of travel reportage Gdyby cała Afryka (If Only the Whole of Africa)57 and never deals with the development of Kapuściński’s travel reportage, which undoubtedly became more and more ‘artistic’ and less and less ‘utilitarian’, to use Rejter’s own distinction.58 In 2004 a group of scholars from Uniwersytet Śląski published a collection of papers entitled Wokół reportażu podróżniczego (Around Travel Reportage), edited by Elżbieta Malinowska and Dariusz Rott. The collection has no formal introduction, but the first paper included in it can be treated as such. It was written by Artur Rejter and is entitled “Wzorzec tekstowy reportażu podróżniczego w aspekcie ewolucji gatunku mowy—​próba syntezy” (A Textual

54 Rejter, Kształtowanie się gatunku reportażu podróżniczego, 8. “[…] zrezygnowano z tekstów w których dominuje funkcja estetyczna, sytuują się one bowiem bezdyskusyjnie w grupie gatunków artystycznych”. 55 Ibid., “Artyzm stanowi bowiem podstawowy wyznacznik stylistyczny przykładów”. 56 Ibid., 103. 57 Ibid., 85. 58 See, e.g., Grzegorz Moroz, Ryszard Kapuściński: “Between Polish and Anglophone Travel Writing”, Studies in Travel Writing, vol. 19, no. 2, 2015, 169–​183.

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Model of Travel Reportage in the Aspect of the Evolution of Genre—​An Attempt at Synthesizing); this text is, in fact, ‘a synthesis’, or a summary of Rejter’s earlier book, discussed above at some length. Rejter repeats here his key points, such as:  that the reportaż podróżniczy should be treated, following Mikhail Bakhtin, as ‘a secondary speech genre’,59 that three periods of this genre’s development can be distinguished (17th-​18th century, 19th century and 20th century)60 and that the gatunek publicystyczny (journalistic genre) shows considerable stylistic and compositional variation.61 It should be pointed out that the title of the collection Wokół reportażu podróżniczego (Around Travel Reportage), because of the ‘nebulous’ word “wokół”, which could be translated as “around” or “about”, allowed its editors to move beyond travel reportage sensu stricto and include papers on travel writing defined with other (quasi)generic terms such as relacje podróżnicze (travel reports) or relacje podróżników (travellers’ reports). In fact, the term reportaż podróżniczy is used only in six out of eighteen papers in this collection. This capacious and nebulous title Wokół reportażu podróżniczego (Around Travel Reportage) was used again when the second volume of papers on travel narratives was published by the University of Silesia in 2007. This volume was edited by Dariusz Rott, who also wrote a short introduction to it. Rott claims in it that the presentation of the development of literary genres connected with travelling, which later found its fruition in the reportaż podróżniczy, is “a neck-​ breaking task”,62 and that the authors of the texts in the volume he has edited followed the clue from Czesław Niedzielski ‘classic’ 1966 book, and have moved back in time, beyond the issues of twentieth-​century reportage, to confront theoretically earlier varieties of documentary prose.63 In 2003 Dorota Kozicka published a paper entitled “Dwudziestowieczne ‘podróże intelektualne’: (Między esejem i autobiografią)” (Twentieth-​century ‘intellectual journeys’: between the essay and autobiography), and a full length book entitled Wędrowcy światów prawdziwych: Dwudziestowieczne relacje z podróży (The Wanderers of Real Worlds:  Twentieth-​Century Accounts of Travels). The first chapter of Kozicka’s book is entitled “Between the Essay and the

59

Artur, Rejter “Wzorzec tekstowy reportażu podróżniczego w aspekcie ewolucji gatunku mowy—​próba syntezy”, in: Wokół reportażu podróżniczego, ed. Elżbieta Malinowska and Dariusz Rott, Katowice, 2004, 8–​9. 60 Ibid., 8. 61 Ibid., 9. 62 Dariusz Rott, “Wstęp”, in Wokół reportażu podróżniczego tom. II, Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice, 7. “karkołomne zadanie”. 63 Ibid., 9.

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Autobiography”, which happens to be the second part of the title of her paper. However, these are two different texts, although with similar conclusions: in her paper she concentrated more on the theoretical aspects of travel narratives, while the first chapter of her book starts with an extensive historical and generic introduction. The key point (at least from the perspective of the present study) which Kozicka makes, both in her paper and in her book, is that the podróż intelektualna (intellectual journey) should be treated as a separate (sub) genre of travel writing, separate especially from the reportaż podróżniczy as defined by Czesław Niedzielski. She accuses Niedzielski of “overgeneralization”64 in his treatment of the travel narratives of writers like Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz as examples of a reportaż podróżniczy. In a further part of the book Kozicka presents erudite, extended analyses of three Polish ‘intellectual travels’/​‘travel accounts’: Zbigniew Herbert’s Barbarzyńca w ogrodzie ( Barbarian in the Garden), Jerzy Stempowski’s Dziennik podróży do Austrii i Niemiec (A Journal of a Journey to Austria and Germany), and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s Podróże do Włoch (Travels to Italy). For all the erudition of both of her texts and the strength of the majority of her arguments, it should be pointed out that Kozicka’s treatment of generic issues is confusing. The type of travel accounts she deals with and which she considers to be unique and separate generically is called by her “podróż intelektualna”(intellectual journey) in the title of her paper. In the first chapter of the book Kozicka explains that she uses the term podróż intelektualna (now she writes the term in italics) in the manner in which Janusz Sławiński used it in Słownik terminów literackich (A Dictionary of Literary Terms).65 The fact that this term is put in the title of the paper in double quotation marks weakens its generic strength, particularly if we compare it with the title of her book (published in the same year) where, despite the fact that she is referring to the same type of texts as the ones in her paper, she uses a different and very general term relacje z podróży (travel accounts), as if to avoid generic confusion. Yet, because of the title of her paper, in fact she created more confusion using two different terms in a book and in a paper published in the same year and both dealing

64 65

Dorota Kozicka “Dwudziestowieczne ‘podróże intelektualne’ (Między esejem a autobiografią)”, Teksty Drugie, 2–​3, 2003, 44. Dorota Kozicka, Wędrowcy światów prawdziwych:  Dwudziestowieczne relacje z podróży, Kraków, 2003, 11. Kozicka in the footnote listed narratives which according to Sławiński were examples of ‘intellectual travels’. They included, among others, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Goethe’s Italianische Reise, Nerval’s Voyage en Orient, and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s Podróże do Włoch (Travels to Italy), a text which Kozicka herself devoted a whole chapter to in her book.

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with the same group of texts—​‘intellectual travels’. Moreover, while explaining the crucial features of the texts she deals with in her books she uses as synonyms two different terms: ‘podróże artystyczne’ and ‘podróże intelektualne’ (‘artistic travels’ and ‘intellectual travels’),66 thus creating more confusion as it is not known if these are ‘generic’ or ‘descriptive’ features of these texts. The fact that Kozicka treats ‘intellectual journeys’ as a hybrid of essay and autobiography induces her to attempt to use some of the tools constructed, on the one hand, by scholars of the autobiography—​such as Małgorzata Czermińska with her notions of postawa autobiograficzna (autobiographical attitude) and trójkąt autobiograficzny: świadectwo—​wyznanie—​wyzwanie (autobiographical triangle: testimony—​confession—​challenge),67 or Phillipe Lejeune’s notion of ‘an autobiographical pact’—​and, on the other, by scholars of the essay such as Andrzej S. Kowalczyk, who stated that one of the key topoi of the essay is the motif of a journey, a stroll, a walk,68 and D.S. Luft, who proposed to treat ‘intellectual journeys’ as just one specific sub-​genre of the essay.69 I would like to conclude my review of Polish travel writing scholars’ generic considerations with some remarks about an issue which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been dealt with, and which is particularly poignant from the generic perspective, much more so when we approach it from the vantage point of the Anglophone genre of the travel book, developing and solidifying over the course of the nineteenth century. There is one more serious problem with the podróż as a genre, apart from its generic status. Scholars like Stanisław Burkot may have treated it as a genre while dealing with Polish Romantic (and Pre-​Romantic) travel writing, but despite the growing popularity of non-​ fiction travel writing in Polish literature throughout the nineteenth century, it was then that this term ceased to be used to refer to non-​fiction, book-​length narratives of real journeys, even though travel narratives in Polish, long and short, in the course of the nineteenth century became more numerous and popular than ever before. While reading Polish researchers dealing with this issue I have not come across any explanation, or even an attempt at an explanation, which would account for this interesting phenomenon.

66 Kozicka, Wędrowcy światów prawdziwych, 49–​51. 67 See Małgorzata Czermińska, Autobiograficzny trójkąt. Świadectwo, wyznanie, wyzwanie, Kraków, 2000. 68 Kozicka, “Dwudziestowieczne ‘podróże intelektualne’ ”, 57. See A.S. Kowalczyk, Kryzys świadomości europejskiej w eseistyce polskiej lat 1945–​1977 (Vincenz, Stempowski, Miłosz), Warszawa, 1990, 24. 69 Ibid., 58. See D.S. Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture 1880–​1942, Berkeley, 1980.

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I would like to venture a working hypothesis about the causes which led to the disappearance of the podróż as a genre, despite the dynamic growth of travel narratives in the course of the nineteenth century in Polish literary tradition. Firstly, the very term podróż is confusing, for it refers to both the instance of travelling and the (usually) non-​fictional book length account. The fact that the name genre was supposed to be written with the use of italics or quotation marks did not help much, as not all writers adhered to this unofficial rule. The confusing situation occurred when the full term opis podróży (description of a journey) was shortened to podróż. The Polish term opis podróży was a translation of the French récit de voyage which was never shortened to voyage and so French travel writing has not been troubled with a similar confusion. Secondly, the growth of the influence of the philosophy of Positivism in this period, particularly after the trauma of one more crushed national uprising, the ‘January Uprising’ of 1863, led to a clear shift of the paradigm, away from Romanticism with its flights of fancy and imagination, toward the direction of realism (and further on, of ‘naturalism’); and from this perspective the old genre of the podróż must have been seen as not fully realistic and too fictitious, particularly in contrast with the short accounts of journeys written in this period for newspapers and magazines, usually in the ‘journalistic style’, i.e. a style requiring a high degree of verisimilitude and realism. The evidence which I am going to use here to support this argument is not taken from literary criticism written in this period, or written by contemporary travel writing scholars, but from a novel written by Eliza Orzeszkowa entitled Nad Niemnem (On the Niemen) which was first published in 1888. In this novel, a set book in Polish schools and a canonical novel of Polish Positivism, the word podróż as a literary genre appears three times, and each time it is connected with the novel’s anti-​hero Aniela Korczyńska, the wife of the novel’s key positive, positivistic protagonist, Benedykt Korczyński. In the first fragment the omniscient narrator muses on the state of the Korczyńskis’ marriage and ventures the claim that it would have been in a much better state if Benedykt, instead of working hard on his manor farm, had decided to “read novels and travel accounts in three languages and look for long hours into her eyes with love”.70 Unfortunately, in the only English translation of the novel by Michelle Granas the term “podróż(e)” was translated through a much broader term ‘travel accounts’, so the point I am trying to make is ‘lost in translation’. This same situation happens with two other instances in which Orzeszkowa

70

Eliza Orzeszkowa, On the Niemen, transl. Michelle Granas, Kindle Edition, 2014, 83. Emphasis G.M.

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disparagingly used the term podróż in the generic sense. It is Aniela’s confidante and friend—​Teresa—​who reads aloud, as Aniela herself is too delicate to do so or read for herself. In chapter ii of the second volume she is reading about “traveling in Egypt”,71 in the fourth chapter of the third volume she is reading “about French travels over an American cape inhabited by Eskimos”.72 As we can see the translator used three different ways to translate the generic word podróż: “travel accounts”, “traveling” and “travels”. However all three contexts in which the term was used in the Polish original are clearly disparaging, and refer to the same genre of podróż. In the third instance, the omniscient narrator uses the case of ‘Eskimos’ to pinpoint Aniela Korczyńska’s naïve, sentimental nature when the following comment is put in her mouth “What do you think, Teresa, does real, poetic love exist among the Eskimos?”73 So, when confronted with this kind of attitude towards podróż as a genre it is not so surprising at all that those writers who chose to relate their travels in writing were not eager to call them podróż, but used, or were advised to use, other, more ‘positive’, or at least, neutral terms such as kartki (postcards) or listy (letters). Thirdly, as mentioned earlier, the disappearance of the term podróż in the second half of the nineteenth century was, paradoxically, accompanied by a distinct growth in popularity of non-​fictional travel narratives. This was connected, to a large extent, with the growth in the popularity of daily newspapers and different types of periodicals, which published mostly shorter types of travel narratives to which the term podróż would not apply, as it usually denoted a book length narrative. Some of these periodicals were even devoted exclusively to travel narratives, for example Dziennik Podróży Lądowych i Morskich (A Journal of Travels and Voyages), which was launched in 1827, or Wędrowiec (The Wanderer), published for more than forty years between 1863 and 1906. Travel narratives published in periodicals of all sorts in the second half of the nineteenth century were usually given general, quasi-​generic labels such as kartki (cards, postcards) or listy (letters). This was the case with the travel narratives of the two most famous novelists and travel writers of this period: Józef Ignacy Kraszewski and Henryk Sienkiewicz. In 1858 Kraszewski went on his ‘Grand Tour’ through Italy, France, Belgium and Germany; he published short travel accounts from this tour in Gazeta Codzienna (Daily Gazette) and Gazeta Polska (Polish Gazette) entitled: “Kartki z przejażdżki po Europie w roku 1858” (“(Post)cards from a trip to Europe in 1858”). When Kraszewski published his ‘Grand Tour’ travel accounts in book form, together with other accounts of his 71 Ibid., 242. 72 Ibid., 593. 73 Ibid., 593.

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travels undertaken in the years 1859–​1864, he gave this two-​volume book the following title Kartki z podróży 1858–​1864 (Postcards from Travels 1858–​1864) (1870/​1874). Henryk Sienkiewicz preferred listy. Listy z podróży do Ameryki, (Letters from a Journey to America) was published by Gazeta Polska (Polish Gazette) in the years 1876–​1878 when Sienkiewicz was travelling in America. When they were put together and published in a book two years later the title was still the same, with the word listy. In 1890 Sienkiewicz embarked on a journey to Africa. The literary output of this journey (apart from the popular adventure novel W pustyni i w puszczy (In Desert and Wilderness) comprised 23 travel sketches/​narratives, of which only two were written when Sienkiewicz was in Africa. However, when they were published as a book in 1893 the title again included the word listy: Listy z Afryki (Letters from Africa). So, it seems that by the end of the nineteenth century the notion of the podróż as a genre was abandoned and replaced by listy (kartki) z podróży, a category which in turn was replaced by reportaż podróżniczy. 2

Pan-​European Dichotomies and Affinities

In his book Europe and the Sea, Michel Mollat du Jourdin claimed that in all European literary traditions two distinct traits of development of the representation of travelling by sea could be discerned, and he traces them to the fourteenth century: Taking into account the diversity of languages, temperaments and circumstances, reference to the sea presents analogies and similarities in texts of a different nature and from different areas. Some, of a conventional nature, are peopled by topoi, others, coming later it seems, seek to express a realist vision of marine phenomena.74 Later in his book Mollat du Jourdin referred to the first of these ways of description as “literary”, and attached to it the world of symbols and imagination. While the other one, according to the French scholar, was bent on close affinity with the methods of science. Mollat du Jourdin claimed that these two types of literary tradition have survived, although both of them have undergone considerable alteration and changes. His classification seems to hold true not

74

Michel Mollat du Jourdin, Europe and the Sea:  The Making of Europe, transl. Teresa Lavender Fagan, Oxford, 1993, 201.

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only for travel literature concerned with descriptions of sea voyages, real and imaginary, but for European travel literature in general, as the descriptions of overland travels observed narrative patterns and rules if not exactly the same, at least very similar to those applied to “sea literature”. Many scholars writing from different perspectives have come up with dichotomous distinctions which resemble Mollat du Jourdin’s pan-​European classification. One was introduced by the Canadian scholar Mary Louise Pratt, who, in Imperial Eyes (1992), claimed that in Anglophone travel writing from the eighteenth century onwards two opposite tendencies could be discerned, which she called “scientific” and “sentimental”.75 On the other hand, Carl Thomson insisted on a division between “Enlightenment” and “Romantic” travel writing.76 Roman Krzywy, while dealing with Polish travel writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, identified two types of inspiration for it: ‘prosaic’ (‘utilitarian’) and ‘poetic‘.77 Barbara Korte, in English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Colonial Explorations (whose book had originally been written in German, and translated into English by Catherine Matthias), introduced a different but clearly parallel and complementary division between “ ‘subject-​oriented’ and ‘object-​oriented’ travelogues”.78 Another distinction in concord with the dichotomies presented above and which is potentially useful in the analysis of the historical development of travel writing in various European literary traditions is the one between a ‘travel writer’ and a ‘traveller writer’, made by Jonathan Sell in his Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–​1616 (2006): I use the term ‘traveller-​writer’, rather than the more usual ‘travel writer’, because unlike Eric Newby, Jan Morris or Paul Theroux, my writers were not professionals, who took as their subjects travel and travelled

75

May Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes:  Travel Writing and Transculturation, London and New York, 2008, 4. In an earlier, 1985 text entitled “Scratches in the Face of the Country”, written almost a decade before her seminal Imperial Eyes, Mary Louis Pratt had suggested a slightly different typology for the dichotomy of narrators in eighteenth century travel writing, as a “sentimental figure” and “manners and customs figure”. See Pratt, Mary Louise, “Scratches on the Face of the Country, or What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen”, Critical Inquiry, 12. 119–​143. Pratt’s later model was later taken up by such scholars as Casey Blanton. See, e.g. The Self and the World. 76 Thompson, Travel Writing, 117. 77 Krzywy, Od hodoeporikonu, 121. “piśmiennictwo prozaiczne (użytkowe)” and “formy poetyckie”. 78 Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, transl. Katherine Matthias, Basingstoke, 4.

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in order to write. On the contrary, they were men who, among other activities, happened to travel, and, for various reasons, were compelled to write about it. There was no literary vocation, while early modern travel was hardly an activity to be indulged in for the trivial purpose to write about it.79 Sell created his dichotomy to distinguish ‘traveller writers’—​explorers or merchants of the Early Modern Period recording their travel experiences for ‘utilitarian purposes’, from ‘travel writers’—​twentieth-​century professionals like Newby, Morris or Theroux, travelling in order to write travel books. Sell’s distinction can also, I think, be convincingly applied to describe the shift which took place in European travel writing in the eighteenth century, the shift from ‘utilitarian’ (and amateur in a literary sense) writers of what in the English tradition was known as ‘voyages and travels’ to ‘professionals’ (in a literary sense), keen to capitalize on the popularity of realistic descriptions of journeys, their own personal popularity (celebrity) and their own (professional) literary skills utilized to describe their often inauspicious travels in order to publish them within the parameters of the nascent genre of the travel book (or the podróż). In spite of some differences of focus, these diversely named categories and dichotomies reveal striking similarities and can be grouped accordingly. On the one hand then, we have ‘literary’ which could be grouped together with ‘sentimental’, ‘Romantic’, ‘poetic’, ‘subject oriented’, ‘travel writers’. Whereas, on the other, we have such labels as: ‘realist’, ‘scientific’, ‘Enlightenment’, ‘utilitarian’, ‘object-​oriented’, ‘traveller writer’. Obviously these dichotomies are only heuristic tools used to account for complex cultural, social and literary processes, and when we approach each individual travel narrative we quickly realize that it exhibits, albeit to a very different degree, features of both polar fields: ‘sentimental’ and ‘scientific’. Apart from the common European dichotomous concepts in travel writing mentioned above, an outline of a pan-​European travel writing canon should also be noted. When Barbara Korte, in “Western Travel Writing 1750–​1950”, was describing the ‘inward turn’ in European travel writing at the end of the eighteenth century she focused on five such key texts: Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1766), Beckford’s Waking Thoughts and Incidents (1783), Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire de Paris a Jérusalem (Journey from Paris to Jerusalem) (1811), Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–​1818), and Goethe’s

79

Jonathan P.A. Sell, Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–​1613. Aldershot, 2006, 19.

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Italianische Reise (Italian Journey) (1816–​1818).80 With the possible exception of Waking Thoughts and Incidents, the first edition of which was suppressed, and the second published more than fifty years later to little critical attention, all the other four narratives have been referred to, more or less explicitly, quite consistently by all generations of travel writers who followed in these literary giants’ wake. However, it should also be noted that whereas Journey from Paris to Jerusalem and Italian Journey are non-​fictional travel narratives (‘the travel books’ to use an Anglophone generic term) A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Childe Harold are generically much more problematic; the former used to be considered a travel book and now is regarded as a novel, the other one, which Byron himself named “A Romaunt”, mixed verse, haughty Spenserian stanzas with down-​to-​earth prose notes characteristic of Romantic travel discourse. Pan-​European affinities could also be perceived even when different scholars employ different terminologies. For example, Jan Borm’s definition of the travel book, so central in this narrative, bears a high degree of similarity with the definition of what David Chirico, in the volume of essays edited by Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-​Francis devoted to Eastern European travel writing, calls “the travel narrative”: A non-​fictional first-​person prose narrative describing a person’s travel(s) and the spaces passed through or visited, which is ordered in accordance with, and whose plot is determined by, the order of the narrator’s act of travelling.81 Moreover, comparison of various strands and lines of generic development of travel writing in different European literary traditions reveals interesting parallels. And so, for example, it turns out that the general confusion caused in Polish travel writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, being the result of the immense popularity of short travel narratives published in newspapers successfully competing in market terms with long book-​length travel narratives, was paralleled by a similar phenomenon called terza pagina described by Loredana Polezzi82 and Nathalie C. Hester83 in the Italian context and crónica 80 81 82 83

Barbara Korte, “Western Travel Writing 1750–​1950” in The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Carl Thompson, London, 2016, 178–​180. David Chirico, “The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre” in Under Eastern Eyes:  A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe, ed. Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-​Francis, Budapest, 2008, 39. Loredana Polezzi, Translating Travel:  Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation, Aldershot, 2001, 37–​40, 141. Nathalie C. Hester, “Italian Travel Writing”, in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs, Cambridge, 2019, 218.

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de viaje (travel chronicle) by Claire Lindsay84 in Hispanic literature. On the other hand, it appears that non-​fictional book-​length travel accounts at the same time were much stronger within ‘major’ European literary traditions: the British, the French and the German. However, obviously, it really requires much, much more research, beyond the scope of this book, research across European and world national travel literatures, to move such a statement from the status of a working hypothesis. 3

Explaining Generic Tools Selected to Approach Travel Writing Diachronically

So far, in this chapter I have provided what I believe to be a comprehensive (even if, at times, tedious) survey of various scholars’ conceptualizations of issues of genre which have appeared at various stages of the development of Anglophone and Polish travel writing studies, and the dichotomies used to account for these developments. Now, I would like to present, clarify and explain the generic standpoint I will, as consistently as possible, apply to my comparative analysis of the historical developments of Anglophone and Polish non-​ fictional travel writing. As already declared in the introduction, the treatment of generic issues in the present study follows John Frow’s Genre, which offers an eclectic, pragmatic approach firmly grounded in cultural studies, with scepticism towards traditional generic hierarchies constructed over the centuries since Plato and Aristotle, by theoreticians and practitioners of Literature with a capital ‘L’. Frow has transcended the limitations of a purely literary understanding of genres, yet his findings are to a large extent based on the arguments and definitions of diverse theories and theoreticians of literature such as Northrop Frye, Hans Georg Jauss, Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Gérard Genette, and Donald Duff, to name but a few. In A Generic History of Travel Writing I  follow Frow’s understanding of genre as “a specific organization of texts with thematic, rhetorical and formal dimensions”,85 which could be distinguished from: • the semiotic medium in which a text is inscribed and presented (speech or writing, colour and line, texture, three-​dimensional mass, the tone and

84

Claire Lindsay, “Hispanic Travel Writing,” in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs, Cambridge, 2019, 229. 85 Frow, Genre, 73.

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pitch of the human voice or of other sounds, recorded and projected light … ); • the ‘radical of presentation’ through which the text is presented to its receiver (first-​or third-​person narration, dramatic narration, non-​ narrative address, song, digital interface, and so on); • mode in the adjectival sense as a thematic and tonal qualification or ‘colouring’ of genre; • sub-​genre, the further specification of genre by a particular thematic or formal content (coronation ode; Petrarchan sonnet).86 Apart from Frow’s book, a text which inspired me and to which I have kept returning whenever my enthusiasm for the generic treatment of Anglophone and Polish travel writing wanes is Guillaume Thouroude’s “Towards generic autonomy: the récit de voyage as mode, genre and form” (2009). In his text Thouroude persuasively presents a stance which might be referred to as describing the ‘travel writing hybridity fallacy’, which he sees as epitomised by Jonathan Raban’s well known, flippant definition: As a literary form, travel writing is a notoriously raffish open house where different genres are likely to end up in the same bed. It accommodates the private diary, the essay, the short story, the prose poem, the rough note and polished table talk with indiscriminate hospitality.87 Thouroude argues that the récit de voyage (non-​fictional travel writing) treated as a genre is no more ‘hybrid’ than other, presumably ‘pure’ genres such as poetry and the novel, that it is a genre in its own right, much more than an “open house”, or an empty container “accommodating” other genres.88 Thouroude strengthens the independent status of the récit de voyage as a genre by referring to and describing two concepts: Karl Viëtor’s understanding of genres in terms of their “ ‘attitude fondamentale’ [basic attitude]”,89 and his own extension of the concept of a ‘pôle d’écriture’, a term which, as he explains, is 86 Ibid. 87 Jonathan Raban, For Love & Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling 1968–​1987, London, 1988, 253–​254. It should be noted that Raban’s witty definition uses the term ‘travel writing’ as synonymous with ‘travel book’. This definition appeared in the review of Paul Fussell’s Abroad (1980) first published by Raban in 1981. The first sentence of the review reads: “It’s no wonder that up till now criticism has shunned the travel book” (253) and is directly followed by the famous definition “As a literary form, travel writing is a notoriously raffish open house …” (253). 88 Thouroude, “Towards generic autonomy”, 381–​383. 89 Thouroude, “Towards generic autonomy: The récit de voyage as mode, genre and form”, Studies in Travel Writing, Vol. 13, No. 4, December 2009, 381. Karl Viëtor, ‘L’histoire des

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used in French as a “legal and industrial metaphor derived from the concept of the magnetic field”, which Thouroude proposes to translate in English as “an attracting field”, “a pole of writing” and a “field of writing”: The notion of a ‘field of writing’ must be understood, in this context, as a literary territory which generates its own creative energy. Looking at literary genres from this point of view leads to a reversal of the critical tendency, […] which defines travel writing overwhelmingly as an ‘open house’. Reversing this perspective makes it possible to see the travel narrative as a fundamental writing practice, well established in history and probably under-​estimated in modern times. If it is true that the récit de voyage accommodates other genres, it is doing so no more than any other genre: after all, the novel accommodates poetry, drama, and travel writing, while prose poems accommodate private diary, fiction, travel writing, etc.90 Thouroude explains that the reason for which he uses the French term ‘récit de voyage’91 in the context of Anglophone travel writing is that the English term ‘travel writing’ encompasses both fictional and non-​fictional texts, and he considers the former to be outside the border of the genre he delimits. Thouroude’s generic arguments are important for travel writing generic discourse and those scholars who want to develop it, but the generic construction I have adopted in A Generic History of Travel Writing is different in one important aspect from “Towards generic autonomy”. Thouroude argues for the treatment of the récit de voyage as a genre, but he does not define it explicitly apart from limiting this genre’s scope by pushing non-​fictional travel writing beyond its borders. In fact, his understanding of the genre of the récit de voyage in the Anglophone context seems to be very similar, if not identical, to Jan Borm’s definition of the travel book as a genre.92 But whereas in Borm’s taxonomy the travel book is a genre which is part of a larger, supra-​generic category called ‘travel writing’ (‘travel literature’ or ‘literature of travel’), Thouroude’s generic position is less transparent, and doubts arise, for example, about what to

90 91

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genres littéraires’, in Poétique, 32, (1977), 490–​506 (491). First published in German in Deutscher Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, Vol. 9 (1931). Guillaume Thouroude, “Towards generic autonomy”, 383. Another scholar who used the French term récit de voyage to account for Anglophone travel writing was Percy G. Adams in his Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (1983). However, Adams regarded both the récit de voyage and the novel as too diverse formally and thematically to be considered as (literary) genres. Borm, “Defining travel”, 4.

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do with texts like guide-​books which are definitely non-​fictional and travel centred, but which are not even narratives. Therefore I follow here the position argued for by scholars like Jan Borm and Bożena Witosz, who treat travel writing as a supra-​generic category, “comprising texts both predominantly fictional and non-​fictional whose main theme is travel”.93 As mentioned in the introduction, I also follow Borm in the manner he positions the travel book as a (crucial) genre in the wider field of travel writing. However, I make one important limitation on Borm’s understanding of the travel book as a genre: the historical (chronological) one. According to Borm’s definition, texts as diverse as the fourth-​century Itinerarum Egeriae, sixteenth-​century ‘voyages and travels’ included in Hakluyt’s voluminous anthologies, and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977), are all ‘travel books’. Mary Campbell, in The Witness and the Other World, (1991) wrote: The history of the travel book before the seventeenth century is, from our perspective, a prehistory, a history of the slow assembling of features that now identify a work as ‘travel literature’. It is perhaps only from the armchair of the postcolonial twentieth century that these works can be seen as bearing close enough family resemblance to constitute a genre.94 It is difficult not to agree with Campbell that the travel narratives she approached in her book, all the way from Itinerarium Egeriae through Mandeville’s Travels to Raleigh’s Discoverie of Guyana, were not written within the same ‘horizon of expectations’, within the same generic paradigms: the first one is a collection of letters from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem written to fellow-​ nuns, the second a medieval chivalric romance, the third an Early Modern non-​fictional travel narrative written mostly to attract capital for further voyages of (imperial) exploration and conquest. Yet, according to Borm’s ahistorical definition, they are all travel books in the strictest sense. Therefore, I adopt a more restrictive definition of this genre. In the present study I argue that the genres of the travel book in Anglophone literature (the ‘modern travel book’ according to Carl Thompson95) and of the podróż in Polish literature started to develop in the eighteenth century out of a wide, nebulous, supra-​generic category known as ‘voyages and travels’ in English, and which developed alongside—​in the relationship of synergy and friction—​the genre 93 94

Borm, “Defining Travel”, 1. Bożena Witosz, “Gatunki podróżnicze”, 14–​15. Mary Baine Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–​1600, Ithaca, 1991, 5. 95 Thompson, Travel Writing, 212.

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of the novel. Texts with travel as the main theme written before are treated here as belonging to a wider, supra-​generic category we now refer to as travel writing.96 In order to avoid getting locked in the binary Anglophone versus Polish travel writing genres, the research on other travel writing traditions is used in A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature to widen the focus. Loredana Polezzi’s Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation and Charles Forsdick’s “De la plume comme des pieds: The Essay as a Peripatetic Genre” have been particularly helpful. In this work I follow Frow when he argues that: […] far from being merely ‘stylistic’ devices, genres create effects of reality and truth, authority and plausibility, which are central to the different ways the world is understood in the writing of history or of philosophy or of science, or in painting, or in everyday talk. These effects are not, however, fixed and stable, since texts—​even the simplest and most formulaic—​do not ‘belong’ to genres but are, rather, uses of them; they refer not to ‘a’ genre but to a field or economy of genres, and their complexity derives from the complexity of that relation.97 Genres evolve dynamically. They shift and “form a horizon of expectations against which any text is read”, and “they are themselves subsumed within a broader horizon formed by a period’s system of genres”.98 In his inspiring book Frow analyses various kinds of genres, and the interactions within them and between them: literary and non-​literary, complex and simple. In the present study I focus on two: that of the travel book and the podróż, and I am concerned with their developments, mostly against the genre of the novel and, to a limited extent, of autobiography. While the genre of the novel achieved ‘literary’ status and ‘artistic’ nobility in the nineteenth century, the genres of the travel book and the podróż remained outside of, or at the very border of, critical focus. It is Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‘secondary (complex) speech genres’ which is extremely useful when it comes to analysing the relationship

96

Carl Thompson in the glossary appended to Travel Writing (206) gave the following definition of ‘voyages and travels’: “From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century the most common generic label for what we would now call ‘travel writing’. However, the category of ‘voyages and travels’ arguably encompassed a broader range of travel-​related travel writings than our modern ‘travel writing’ ”. 97 Frow, Genre, 2. 98 Ibid., 76.

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between genres, the status of which has been floating and uncertain: somewhere between ‘literary’, ‘utilitarian’ and ‘journalistic’:99 Secondary (complex) speech genres—​novels, dramas, all kinds of scientific research, major genres of commentary, and so forth—​arise in more complex and comparatively highly developed and organized cultural communication (primarily written) that is artistic, scientific, socio-​ political, and so on. During the process of their formation, they absorb and digest various primary (simple) genres that have taken form in unmediated speech communion.100 Bakhtin’s notion of secondary speech genres, as presented earlier in this chapter, has been used by Polish travel writing scholars like Andrzej Rejter, Dariusz Rott and Bożena Witosz to cope with the genre of the reportaż podróżniczy, and deal with the fact that it has been denied the status of a ‘literary genre’ by hierarchically oriented liberal humanist literary scholars. Bakhtin lists the novel as the first of the secondary speech genres, and although he does not specifically mention any of the non-​fictional travel genre(s) his definition is capacious enough to include not only the genres of the travel book and the podróż, but also other, ‘utilitarian’ genres such as the letter, the diary/​journal, the memoir or the essay, genres which ‘hybrids’ like the novel or the travel book rely on and pick quite freely from. Genres have, as we remember, “thematic, formal and rhetorical dimensions”, and these dimensions dynamically evolve in opposition to other ‘competing’ genres, while many crucial aspects of all genres transcend the boundaries between these three fields labelled ‘thematic’, ‘formal’ and ‘rhetorical’. So the genre of the travel book as I describe it started to evolve in the middle of the eighteenth century alongside the genres of the novel and autobiography. The travel book’s main theme, from the beginnings till today, is stable: travel. It shared, has shared and is sharing this theme with other genres which are included in a wider, supra-​generic field today known as travel writing and earlier as ‘voyages and travels’. It is the travel book’s formal and rhetorical dimensions which distinguish it from other travel writing genres, and these dimensions, unlike the stable theme, have developed quite dynamically over time. From the onset the travel book, formally always a first person narrative, relied (as did the novel) on 99

See, e.g., Stanisław Burkot’s definition of the genre of the podróż as “gatunek pogranicza” (borderline genre), Polskie podróżopisarstwo romantyczne, 6. 100 Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, transl. Vern V. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, 1986, 62.

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such ‘secondary speech genres’ of first person narration as the diary/​journal (Fielding’s Journal of the Voyage to Lisbon) or a collection of letters (Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy). Later, other formal options were used such as the simple short story or the essay. In fact, as Paul Fussell persuasively argued in Abroad, “[t]‌he more we attend to what’s going on in the travel book between the wars, the more we perceive that the genre is a device for getting published essays which, without the travel ‘menstruum’ (as Coleridge would say), would appear too old-​fashioned for generic credit”.101 But such texts as The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World … (1726), now regarded as novels, when they were published purported to be ‘authentic’ travel narratives, “written by Himself” as Robinson Crusoe’s title page advertised, or by Lemuel Gulliver. In order to distinguish fictional novels pretending to be non-​fictional travel narratives from truly non-​fictional travel narratives a rhetorical device was needed which is now called a ‘referential pact’. This pact would finally, many decades later, create two distinct ‘horizons of expectations’: of the novel, which is assumed to be fictional, and the travel book, considered predominantly non-​fictional. The concept of a ‘referential pact’ (le pacte référentiel), according to Charles Forsdick, could be rendered in simple terms as “I am going to tell you what I saw”.102 Another important rhetorical aspect of the developing genre of the travel book was its focus on the persona of the narrator, from the mid-​eighteenth century often a professional celebrity writer. In travel writing studies this development is described as a shift from ‘scientific’ to ‘sentimental’ (Pratt, Blanton), and as ‘object-​oriented’ to ‘subject-​oriented’ (Korte) travel narratives, a shift from ‘traveller writers’ to ‘travel writers’ (Sell). However, it should be remembered that the genre of the Anglophone travel book apart from ‘aesthetic/​ artistic’ travel books written to a large extent by both female and male professional celebrity-​novelists eager to share their (often inauspicious travels) with their growing readership, there existed well into the end of the nineteenth century a different type of travel book, a ‘scientific’ one, by travellers-​explorers like Mary Graham, Richard Burton, David Livingstone, Mary Kingsley, James Bruce and Alexander Humboldt. This type of travel book, which Carl Thompson—​ following Ina Ferris and Robin Jarvis—​aptly classified as belonging to “knowledge genres”103 and some of which Nigel Leask so aptly analysed in Curiosity 1 01 Fussell, Abroad, 204. 102 Charles Forsdick, Feroza Basu and Siobhan Shilton, New Approaches to Twentieth-​Century Travel Literature in French: Genre, History, Theory, Frankfurt am Mein, 2006, f. 7, 54. 103 Carl Thompson, “Nineteenth-​Century Travel Writing” in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs, Cambridge, 2019, 111, 123–​124.

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and Aesthetics in Travel Writing (2002), remain however, outside the scope of the present study, which focuses on aesthetic/​artistic travel books that relied on scientific discourse only to a very limited extent and, which, unlike the ‘scientific’ travel books, survived and flourished in the twentieth century and continue to do so in the twenty-​first. It is such twentieth-​century aesthetic/​artistic travel books that will be compared with Polish reportaże podróżnicze in the two final chapters of the present study. Unlike the Anglophone genre of the travel book, the Polish podróż, which till the middle of the nineteenth century managed to acquire a set of thematic, formal and rhetorical features on a par with its English language equivalent, started to lose what generic stability it had and was transformed into the more generically constrained listy z podróży and later into reportaż podróżniczy. Armed with the generic tools described above, I will analyse and compare in the following five chapters the developments of Anglophone and Polish travel writing from the sixteenth-​century Neo Latin influences to contemporary travel books written in English and their Polish generic ‘equivalents’. The comparative approach I will stick to in the present study is inspired, to a large extent by the philosophical musings of Tadeusz Sławek, a renowned Polish theoretician of literature and a Blake scholar, who argues that the concept of a “Contrary” marks a trajectory for thinking about comparative literary studies. He quotes a fragment from Blake’s Milton to support his message: There is a Negation & there is a Contrary The Negation must be destroyed to redeem the Contraries The Negation is the Spectre, the Reasoning Power in Man This is a False Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit: A Selfhood which must be put away and annihilated always To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-​examination.104 Sławek argues convincingly that the comparative approach should not be treated as a Negation, but a Contrary, that different national literatures should not be negated in an act of annexation but that their polemic (in the Heraclitean sense of polemos) tensions should be explored, so that a ‘bridge’, a ‘connexion’ between them is established. Thanks to this bridge, we can, when we stand in the middle of it, have a view of both sides. But there is no view if there is no beholder. Studying of Contraries imbedded in different national literatures should be an attempt to cleanse in us, researchers-​beholders, the layers 104 William Blake, Milton, plate 40, 32–​33.

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of accumulated stereotypes and opinions, “the False Body”, in order to reveal our “Immortal Spirit”.105 When I  was plodding through subsequent chapters of the present study I have kept in mind Tadeusz Sławek’s metaphor of comparative literary studies as a bridge connecting different literary traditions in the manner of a ‘Contrary’, but not of a ‘Negation’. I am not certain to what extent my beholder’s perspective has been cleansed of “the False Body”, but I  am convinced that the view from the bridge constructed between Anglophone and Polish travel writing has allowed me to see aspects of either of them which I  would not have been able to discern had I approached these two literary fields separately. These findings are worth sharing both with the travel writing scholars community and with other researchers interested in these issues. I am aware of the impact of my theoretical stance—​which can be labelled as generic and ‘post liberal humanist’—​on the developments of my arguments and on my conclusions. One book which can be used as a gauge, a litmus test, to show what happens when different theoretical foundations are applied to a similar range of texts—​in this case to a historical overview of non-​fiction travel writing—​is Percy G. Adams’s Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel. This book was first published in 1983, but as Adams admits in his Preface “the book has been long in the making”.106 This book is firmly embedded in the liberal humanist assumptions of the superiority of the generic hierarchy of texts, even though it is openly ageneric, for Adams declares that both travel literature and the novel were historically too hybrid and too diverse to be considered genres—​a move which is fairly orthodox in the former case and fairly radical in the latter. The liberal humanist conviction of the novel’s generic superiority over non-​fiction travel literature and the necessity to focus on ‘High Literature’ influenced the book’s structure and its conclusions. In the first chapter Adams presents the evolution of the novel and in the second one the evolution of travel literature from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century—​mostly in English and French literature. The remaining nine chapters are devoted to tracing influences which travel literature had on “the evolution of the novel”. The following issues are foregrounded:  the truth-​lie-​dichotomy, realism and romanticism, structure, motifs, character types, language and style. Adams read and analysed an impressive plethora of travel narratives of the Early Modern Period, but they are not the focus of his study; they become sources and inspiration for the novel’s 105 Tadeusz Sławek, “Literatura porównawcza: między lekturą, polityką i społeczeństwem”, Postscriptum, no. 2–​1 (48–​49), 2004–​2005, 70–​71. 106 Adams, Travel Literature, ix.

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evolution—​the ultimate and crucial object of the book. Czesław Niedzielski’s O teoretycznoliterackich tradycjach prozy dokumentarnej (1966)—​an ur-​text in Polish writing studies, a book so often referred to in A Generic History of Travel Writing—​adopts a similar, liberal humanist perspective, of the novel as an ‘ultimate arbiter’ in the analysis of the development of Polish documentary prose from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. In my book the novel as a genre is important, but it is not the lens through which travel writing is shown. In the present study the focus is on (generic) developments in Anglophone and Polish travel writing with the novel perceived as ‘a companion genre’.

­c hapter 2

Anglophone and Polish Travel Writing in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries We start the comparative analysis of travel writing in Polish and Anglophone literature at the beginning of the Renaissance; a time of intensive geographical discoveries and the mercantile expansion following in its wake. Geographical exploration, mercantile ventures, as well as other forms of travel prominent all over Europe such as diplomatic missions and religious pilgrimages were represented textually, and these representations were performed according to standards that were not always explicitly presented, and which were dynamically evolving. But whereas in the case of Polish literature the sixteenth century is the period of its beginnings, the English literary tradition had already existed for some eight centuries. England’s literary history is definitely much longer than the Polish one, going back to the early Anglo-​Saxon period. Widsith, an autobiographical record of the wanderings of a professional story teller, a scop, “dates from the late seventh or early eighth century, though parts of it must be older even than that”,1 whereas the first text written in Polish, Kazania Świętokrzyskie (Świętokrzyskie Sermons) was recorded only in the fourteenth century, and the first poems (religious songs and hymns) were written only in the fifteenth century.2 Thus we begin in the times of the Renaissance, when both Polish and English travel literatures started to develop dynamically. But it should be remembered that travel was one of the recurring, very important themes, present not only in Widsith but also in Beowulf, the Seafarer and the Wanderer, or in the medieval texts of Margery Kempe or Geoffrey Chaucer. Yet, it was not till the Renaissance, the period of new geographical discoveries, that the category of texts later labelled as ‘voyages and travels’ started to develop.3 Another crucial factor which made these developments possible was the invention of printing and the subsequent translations into many European languages of travel narratives, which were to form a Pan-​European canon such as Marco Polo’s Travels

1 David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, vol. I, London, 1960, 7–​8. 2 Julian Krzyżanowski, Historia Literatury Polskiej, Alegoryzm-​ Preromantyzm, Warszawa, 1979, 31–​55. 3 See, e.g., Thompson, Travel Writing, 206.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004429611_004

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or the Travels of Sir John de Mandeville.4 However, it should also be borne in mind that the editing and published history of some of the ‘classical’ texts which are now considered canonical in travel writing was really complex and these texts remained for centuries in manuscript forms; therefore, for all their canonicity of today they had no or very little impact on later travel narratives. Such is the case of Itinererium Egeriae, the manuscript of which was found by G.F. Gammurini in the monastery in Arezzo in 1884 and first published in 1887. Whereas in the case of Columbus’s Journal of the First Voyage: the original and its only copy have disappeared but the historian Fray Bartolemé de las Casas, whose father and uncle travelled on Columbus’s second voyage in 1493 voyage, appears to have consulted one or other of them in preparation of his own History of the Indies. Las Casas […] made a lengthy digest of Columbus’s journals, summarising and reproducing parts of them he thought were especially interesting.5 The geographical position of England and Poland, at different ends of Europe’s east-​west axis, shaped not only the different histories of these two nations, but also had a major impact on the different ways of travel writing of English and Polish literatures. Poland and England in the first half of the sixteenth century, the beginning of the process of Europe’s geographical exploration, and mercantile and colonial expansion into the New World, were countries of comparable economic and demographic potentials. England in 1550 was a country of roughly three million people.6 Poland, before its Union with the Duchy of Lithuania in 1569, had roughly five million people.7 Before the period of explorations and England’s mercantile expansion, their economies were similarly agricultural and relied on one or two export commodities: sheep’s wool in the case of England, timber and grain in the case of Poland. From the perspective of sea explorations, foreign voyages, and possible colonial expansion they were situated very differently. England is, after all, an island, placed at Europe’s western extremities, and, along with such countries as the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Portugal, forms the “old continent’s” wide gateway to the recently discovered New World. Poland was not exactly 4 See, e.g, Gerald Maclean, “Early Modern Travel Writing (1): Print and Early Modern European Travel” in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs, Cambridge, 2019, 62–​76. 5 Claire Lindsay, “Hispanic Travel Writing”, 22. 6 Sheldon J. Watts, A Social History of Western Europe: 1450–​1720, New York, 1984, 20. 7 Jerzy Lukowski and Hubert Zawadzki, A Concise History of Poland, Cambridge, 2001, 48.

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landlocked in this period, because as a result of the victorious Thirteen Years War with the Teutonic Knights and the Treaty of Toruń (Thorn) in 1466, it regained possession of the province of Pomorze Gdańskie, with around 100 kilometres of Baltic sea coast and the major sea port of Gdańsk (Danzig). Gdańsk was a conveniently located port at the mouth of the Vistula river, down which grain, timber and other products were shipped. Nevertheless, Poland remained a country gravitating towards the continental East and South, where the chances for expansion seemed to be bigger. This tendency increased after 1569 when Poland and Lithuania signed the union treaty in Lublin, forming the Commonwealth of Two Nations. The Commonwealth, with its territory of a million square kilometres, was the second largest country in Europe (after Russia, but well ahead of France or Spain). England at that period was concentrating on the mercantile and colonial race overseas, catching up with Spain and Portugal in the course of the sixteenth century, and outdistancing the Netherlands throughout the seventeenth, but it was also pursuing an aggressive policy of colonization closer to home in Ireland, throughout the Elizabethan period and later in the times of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Poland’s coercion of Lithuania into the Commonwealth of two Nations was followed by a long series of wars on its long north-​eastern, eastern and south-​eastern borders; wars with Prussia, Sweden, Muscovy, the Ottoman Empire, Walachia and the rebelling Ukrainian Cossacks. The Polish colonial project at its peak at the beginning of the seventeenth century covered regions extending far into the East beyond the lands ethnically Polish; into Livonia, Belorussia and the Ukraine. Continuous wars together with weak central government were to lead to Poland’s decline in power in the course of the second half of the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth century and, finally, led to the three partitions by the three (by then) imperial players—​Russia, Prussia and Austria—​and Poland’s loss of independence in 1795. 1

Neo-​Latin Tradition and Its Influence on English and Polish Travel Writing

Latin was the language of instruction at all European universities in that period, the lingua franca of European elites. The conventions of Latin and neo-​ Latin literature had a much bigger impact on the Polish travel writing of that period than on English travel writing. One of the main reasons for this situation was the fact that in the sixteenth century the Polish language had a very short and uncertain tradition as a literary language, and writers were much more liable to resort to Latin to give their texts the aura of prestige. The other

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important reason was that the majority of Polish travellers, and, subsequently, travel writers of this period, were members of the nobility, trained to read and write in Latin, whereas in England there were considerably more merchants and explorers who were ‘commoners’, with, generally, much less classical Latin education in their childhood and adolescence, so when they turned to putting down their experiences into narratives, they usually did it in the vernacular. While looking at the developments of neo-​Latin travel narratives, let us first consider the ways in which they were approached formally as well as thematically in the books on (prescriptive) poetics written by two key figures of this period. One was an Italian, Julius Caeser Scaliger (Giulio Cesare della Scalla), “who in his great erudition aspired to the ideal of ‘uomo universale’ ”.8 Scaliger’s seven volume treatise, entitled Poetices, Libri Septem was published three years after his death in 1561, in Lyons. The other one was a Pole, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (Mathias Casimirius Sarbievius), called “Horatius Christianus” and “Horatius Sarmaticus”. Piotr Urbański observed that whereas Sarbiewski was named “Horatius Sarmaticus” only in 1721, the “nickname” “Horatius Christianus” had been used earlier; it showed Sarbiewski’s poetry “as a new Christian incarnation of the poetry of Horace, and placed it within the international community of the Republica Literaria”.9 Of the two large treatises on poetry written by Sarbiewski, the one of importance for consideration here, because it was on epic poetry, is entitled, De perfecta poesi sive Vergilius et Homerus.10 The key term used by Scaliger and Sarbiewski in the context of travelling was hodoeporicon. The Latin word hodoeporicon is derived from the Greek verb hodoiporein (‘to travel’) and it is not encountered in texts of classical Latin. It appears for the first time in a text from the beginning of the 4th century by St. Jerome known as Epitaphium sanctae Paulae, in which the term hodoeporicon is used to refer to a detailed travel journal of St. Paul and not to the loose, general descriptions of journeys examinedelsewhere in this text.11 Later, the term hodoeporicon was, for example, used to refer to the part of a hagiography of St. Willibald entitled Willibaldi episcopi Eichstetensis, written by his cousin 8 9

10 11

Plett, Heinrich F., Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture, Berlin, 2004, 181. Piotr Urbański, “Cultural and National Identity in Jesuit Neo-​Latin Poetry in Poland in the Seventeenth Century. The Case of Sarbiewski” in Latinitas in the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Its Impact on the Development of Identities, ed. Giovanna Siedina, Firenze, 2004, 97. It was published for the first time only in 1954; alongside its Polish translation. Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski O poezji doskonałej czyli Wergiliusz i Homer. (De Perfecta Poesi, Siver Vergilius et Homerus), transl. M. Plezia, ed. S. Skimins, Wrocław: bss 1954. Roman Krzywy, Od hodoeporikonu do eposu peregrynackiego: Studium z historii form literackich, Warszawa: Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2001, 52–​53.

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Huneberc, in the eighth century, describing Saint Willibald’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land.12 Throughout the Neo-​Latin period the term hodoeporicon was used consistently as a synonym of the older Latin term itinerarium.13 In Neo-​ Latin poetry the term hodoeporicon was used for the first time by the German Humanist Conrad Celtis, who applied it to refer to his three poems from the collection Quattuor libri amorum (1502).14 Similarly to today’s terminological confusion with different genres and the sub-​genres, located within, on the borderland and outside of travel writing, there were a lot of confusing and overlapping terms used by Neo-​Latin theoreticians (and ‘practitioners’) of poetry. Scaliger, in the third book of his treatise, introduces three different poetic forms:  propemticon, apopempticon and hodoeporicon, which he treats, in general, as synonymous.15 Propemticon was a poem written in the situation of departing. It contained a complaint against the departure, which was to dissuade the traveller in spe from leaving. Apopempticon, in turn, was a farewell address/​song of the traveller himself.16 In his treatise Sarbiewski added one more type of poem implicated in the theme of travelling: epibaterion, in which the heavens are thanked on return from a long overseas voyage or from exile.17 Hodoeporicon was identified through its theme and not through its form. In fact, neo-​Latin poets used hodoeporicon in a variety of forms, “including the Horatian ode, the elegy, and the hexameter poem […] to invigorate their travel experiences with descriptions of landscapes and cultural phenomena encountered along the way”.18 Two German anthologies of hodoeporica published in the second half of the sixteenth century—​Natan Chytraeus’s Hodoeporica sive itineraria a diversis clariss[imis] doctissimisque viris[…] (1575) and Nicolaus Reusners’s Hodoeporicorum sive Itinerum totius fere orbis lib[ri] vii[…] (1580)—​show the 12

Saint Willibald was born c. 700 A.D. in Wessex. After his pilgrimage to the Holy Land he moved to Franconia, where he was active in missionary work and eventually became the bishop of Eischtȁtt. See, e.g., Dietz 200–​212. 13 Krzywy, Od hodoeporikonu, 68. 14 It is the titles of Celtis’s that indicate the ‘travelling’ aspect of these ‘love elegies’, as well as his itineraries: Hodoeporicon a Sarmatia per Slesiam, Boemos et Moravos et quae flumina ab illis exeant. Hodoiporicon, id est itinerarium ex agro Norico ad Rhenum per Suevos et Bacenis silvam autumnaleque sidus describit and Hodoeporicon a Rheno ad sinum Codonum et mare Balticum et Tylen insulam. 15 Krzywy, Od hodoeporikonu, 69. 16 Edmund Kotarski, Sarmaci i morze, Marynistyczne początki w literaturze polskiej XVI-​XVII wieku, pwn, 1995, p. 104. 17 Sarbiewski, O poezji doskonałej, 246. 18 Wilhelm Kühlmann, Neo-​Latin Literature in Early Modern Germany, in Early Modern German Literature 1350–​1700, ed. Max Reinhart, Rochester, NY, 289–​290.

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diversity of texts collected under this heading: both Chytraeus and Rausner included texts by ancient authors such as Ovid, Valerius Flakkus or Horace (in fact, Horace’s “Iter Brundisium” appears in both anthologies), as well as many neo-​Latin poems describing real travels. Chytraeus included in his anthology eight of his own ‘travel’ poems, but also one hundred epigrammatic descriptions of towns and cities written by Ausonius and Scaliger. Reusner, on the other hand, felt free to include in his anthology two prose narratives (Petrarch’s Iter Palaestinum and Felix Petancius’s De itineribus in Turciam) as well as many fragments of ancient ‘fictional’ poems, and Stigelius’s Latin summary of the Odyssey.19 In the circle of Polish Neo-​Latin poets the first ‘travel poems’, albeit not explicitly called hodoeporicon, were written by Wawrzyniec Korwin (Laurentius Corvinus, Lorenz Rabe). Carmen … quo valedicit Prutenos (Song … on Leaving Prussia) (1509) is a syncretic elegy based on the frame of Korwin’s journey from Prussia to Silesia. In its laudatory part it praises not only the natural beauties and treasures of the land of Prussia, but also the land’s great people: the bishop Łukasz Watzenrode (Lukas Watzenrode) and a friend of Korwin—​Mikołaj Kopernik (Nicolaus Copernicus). Elegy number five of Klemens Janicjusz (Clemens Ianicius) from his Tristium liber (Book of Sorrow) (1542), derivative of Ovid’s tradition, describes, in an epistolary fashion, the poet’s return journey from Padua in Italy. The focus in this poem is placed on complaints about poor roads, the lack of hospitality of inn-​keepers, adverse weather, horrible food, etc. In other words, it is a typical travel as travail type of narrative. Jan Rybiński (Johannes Rybinius) was the first of this group of poets to use the term hodoeporicon for a book of his travel elegies: Hodoeporicorum liber unus (1595). Rybiński’s collection consists of fourteen elegies describing different travelling episodes from the period of his university studies. This collection has been referred to as carmens elegans, the type of literature bent on showing the intellectual and scholarly potential of the narrative persona, concentrating on the works of art and the great Humanist personalities encountered on the way. Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski’s hodoeporicon, entitled, Iter Romanorum, described his journey to Rome in 1622, where Sarbiewski was to study, to write poetry, to write about poetry, and (presumably) be crowned poeta laureates (poet laureate) by pope Urban vii. Iter Romanorum is an epistolary elegy in which Sarbiewski balanced quite evenly ‘objective’ and to a large extent ‘standardized’ descriptions of the towns, cities and whole areas, with ‘subjective’ passages, characterized by the dominance of the narrative persona and the 19 Krzywy, Od hodoeporikonu, 49–​52.

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travails he suffers: sunstroke, or flight from a band of robbers who attacked him and his travelling companion. ‘Road poems’ written by all three Polish Neo-​Latin poets: Wawrzyniec Korwin, Jan Rybiński and Mikołaj Kazimierz Sarbiewski share many important similarities. Formally, they are all elegies and, therefore, show their authors’ following more in the steps of Ovid’s exilic elegies than Horace’s ‘road satire’ Iter Brundisinum.20 They all also display strong narrative personae constructed on the one hand as erudite Humanists, and on the other as individuals braving the travails of their journeys. In the course of the sixteenth century Polish developed dynamically as a literary language, although it was to depend for quite a while on Latin literary traditions for its generic forms. This process can be best observed in the writings of Jan Kochanowski (1530–​1584), the most renowned and famous Polish poet of the Renaissance period. Kochanowski, after an initial spell as a Neo-​Latin poet, when he wrote epigrams, epitaphs and elegies, decided to turn to the vernacular and composed poems which became foundational for the whole Polish literary tradition: nineteen elegies entitled Treny (1584) (Threnodies, translated into English as Laments), a satire Zgoda (1564) (Accord) and a book of witty epigrams Fraszki (1584) (Epigrams).21 The development of Polish travel writing, at first written mostly in ‘international’ languages such as Latin and German and only later in the vernacular was paralleled by similar developments in other East European literatures such as Czech, Hungarian or Croatian.22 In comparison with the Polish literary tradition, the role of neo-​Latin influences in English literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seems to be less prominent, which is probably, as suggested above, the result of the fact that the vernacular English was at that time a much more sophisticated literary tool and was much more widely used by traveller writers of this period. The text in Latin which had by far the greatest impact on the development of English travel writing is Thomas More’s De optimo rei publicae deque nova insula Utopia published in 1516. The first English translation of Utopia, by .

20 21

22

Ibid., 117–​118. Kochanowski’s decision to turn from Latin to the vernacular in many ways parallels Geoffrey Chaucer’s shift, undertaken some two hundred years earlier, from the cosy standards of a sophisticated language and the literary traditions of French and Italian into the coarse medium of his vernacular, middle English. Both poets are traditionally referred to as the ‘Father’ of Polish and English Literature, respectively. It should be remembered, however, that Kochanowski kept composing poetry in Latin till his death. See, e.g., Alex Drace-​Francis, “Towards a Natural History of East European Travel Writing”, in A Comparative Introduction of Travel Writing on Europe, ed. Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-​Francis, Budapest and New York, 2008, 10–​11.

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Ralph Robinson, was published relatively late, in 1551, while German, Italian and French translations had all come out earlier.23 Both contemporary translators of Utopia into English, Paul Turner (1965) and Dominic Baker-​Smith (2012), in their respective introductions to this narrative point to Lucian’s The True History and Horace’s Satires as the main and most direct influences for Thomas More.24 Thomas More took from Lucian the custom of giving his characters names which are seemingly outlandish, but ultimately (and for the learned) meaningful. Most of these names are of Greek derivation. More’s traveller to Utopia is named Hythlodeaus, which in Greek means ‘dispenser of nonsense’, while Utopia means ‘no place’, Anydrus (the name of a river) means ‘not water’, and Ademus (the title of the chief magistrate) means ‘not people’.25 But the tendency towards fantasy is balanced with an emphasis on realism. More’s Utopia is structured as a framed narrative, and both the outer and the inner frames are indebted (although in various ways) to travel discourse. The outer frame, narrated by More’s persona himself, depicts in a thoroughly realistic fashion the diplomatic trip to Flanders which Thomas More took in 1515 to deal with “a rather serious difference of opinion between the great expert in the art of government, His Invincible Majesty, King Henry the Eighth of England, and His Serene Highness, Prince Charles of Castile”.26 Then, More’s persona tells of his meeting in Bruges with Peter Gilles “ a very fine person, as well as a very fine scholar”.27 In fact, Gilles was a real person and the Town Clerk of Antwerp.28 It is through Peter Gilles that More meets a seasoned traveller named Raphael Nonsenso (as Raphael Hythlodeaus is called in Turner’s English translation of Utopia). The three of them meet in the centre of Bruges and More’s persona explains that “[a]‌fter making a few stock remarks, as people generally do when first introduced, we adjourned to the garden of my hotel, where we sat down on a bench covered with a layer of turf, and began to talk more freely”.29 The

23

Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Review of: Thomas More, Utopia, translated, edited and introduced by Dominic Baker-​Smith”, London: Penguin Books, 2012. xl + 148 pages, Moreana Vol. 50, 193–​194, (Dec. 2013), 274. 24 Paul Turner, “Introduction”, in Thomas More, Utopia, translated with an introduction by Paul Turner, Penguin Book, Harmondsworth, 1974, 7–​8. Dominic Baker-​Smith, Dominic “Introduction”, in Thomas More, Utopia, translated, edited and introduced by Dominic Baker-​Smith. London: Kindle Edition), 2012 Location 140. 25 Turner, “Introduction”, 8. 26 Thomas More, Utopia, translated with an introduction by Paul Turner, Harmondsworth, 1974, 37. 27 Ibid., 38. 28 Turner, “Introduction”, 8. 29 More, Utopia, 39.

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fantastic, unrealistic tale of Raphael Nonsenso about his visit to the land of Utopia, which forms the inner story of More’s narrative, is carefully shrouded in details, which bring an aura of authenticity and real journeys. Peter Gilles introduces and recommends Raphael Nonsenso to More’s narrative persona in the following way: He wanted to see the world, so he left his brothers to manage his property in Portugal—​that’s where he comes from—​and joined up with Amerigo Vespucci. You know those Four Voyages of his that everyone’s reading about? Well, Raphael was his constant companion during the last three, except that he didn’t come back with him from the final voyage. Instead, he practically forced Amerigo to let him be one of the twenty-​four men who were left behind in that fort. So he stayed out there, to indulge his taste for travels, which was all he really cared about.30 The narrative which Thomas More called Four Voyages and attributed to Amerigo Vespucci had been originally named Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci delle isole nuovamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi (Letter of Amerigo Vespucci concerning the isles newly discovered on his four voyages), known as Lettera al Soderini. It is a letter in Italian addressed to Piero Soderini, published in 1505. It claimed to be an account of four voyages to the Americas made by Vespucci between 1497 and 1504.31 A  Latin translation of this letter was published by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507 in a book of cosmography and geography entitled Cosmographiae Introductio with the title “Quattuor Americi Vespuci navigations” (Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci) and it is this narrative that More used to ‘authenticate’ Raphael Nonsenso as a traveller.32

30 31

32

Ibid., 38–​39. Many scholars believe that Lettera al Soderini was a forgery. See, for example, the chapter “The Forgeries” (147–​167) in Frederick J. Pohl, Amerigo Vespucci. Pohl claims there that the letter was written in poor Italian and that the highly literate Vespucci could not have written it. However, apart from the first voyage of 1497, the other three are considered to have really been undertaken by Vespucci. Interestingly enough, More, as we have seen in the fragment quoted from Utopia, insists that Raphael Nonsenso accompanied Vespucci on his “last three voyages”, thus “excluding him” from this first voyage, now considered fictional. Was it just a coincidence, or perhaps, a testimony of More’s ability to differentiate fact from fiction and turn the border crossing between them into one more joke of his? It was in Cosmographiae Introductio that Waldseemüller, while drawing the map of the New World, was the first to name the new continent “America”, after the feminine Latin version of Vespucci’s first name.

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More’s Utopia came to be so popular and influential in sixteenth-​century England, particularly in matters concerning the discovery of new worlds, that travel writers often deliberately distanced their own works from it in an attempt to distinguish their truth from More’s fiction.33 “But that distancing notwithstanding, they also derived from the introductory matter to Utopia a series of topics that served to configure the genre of travel writing”.34 Although in the sixteenth-​century in England the use of Latin in texts connected with travel was not as extensive as in Poland in that period, the ‘strength’ of Neo-​Latin, Humanist culture permeated most literary endeavours in the area we now designate as travel writing in diverse ways. As Jonathan Sell demonstrated in his Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing 1560–​1613, the thorough education in Latin of the English traveller writers led to their extensive use of rhetorical tropes in their travel accounts written (mostly) in English. According to Sell, English traveller writers were more eager and willing to apply the art of rhetoric in their texts than their continental colleagues, because: English colonialism was not funded by the Crown, but relied on private wealth for its finance; as a consequence, the pressure on colonial writers to sell their representations, to engage potential investors both intellectually and emotionally—​in short, to persuade, was extremely great.35 However, Sell also stressed the fact that the metaphorical epistemology founded on the art of rhetoric conceived of in antiquity “came to be questioned as traveller writers sought more empirical grounds of belief. The move towards empiricism is symptomatic of the onset of scientific materialism”.36 The classical education and frame of mind also had a deep bearing on the ways in which traveller writers tried to make sense of the new worlds they were first exploring and then depicting. The most prominent travel narrative from this perspective is Richard Sandys’s The Relation of a Journey Begun an. Dom. 1610, in Four Books (1615). Sandys depicted his long journey through Venice, Constantinople (Istanbul), Egypt, Palestine, Cyprus, Naples to Rome, and for generations his account became the standard reference about the ­Ottoman Empire. 33 Campbell, The Witness, 211–​212. 34 Jonathan P.A. Sell, Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–​1613. Aldershot, 2006, 70. 35 Ibid., 16. 36 Ibid., 23.

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Its carefully crafted prose is replete with classical references, mythology and historical precedent. It was through the ancients that Sandys understood this new world, it was through the ancients that he brought it into collective consciousness and it was through the ancients that he delivered to his empire-​envious English audience understanding of the greatest European power of the day […] For Sandys therefore, the Turk could be fully comprehended and indeed made fully comprehensible only as part of a landscape that stretched back to mythological past.37 In a paper devoted to the analysis of Greek landscapes in Sandys’s book, Efterpi Mitsi, a Greek travel writing scholar, observed that in it “the sight of the foreign place, is itself a translation, a rendering of the unknown into the known, similar to the appreciation of the classics through the work of the Renaissance translator”.38 Eighty years later, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the neo-​Latin culture was on the wane, although it was not wholly gone. In the early days of the Grand Tour, Joseph Addison, in his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), extensively used poems (in the Latin original) of the ancient poets to present the characteristic features of the parts of Italy he visited. Donald Johnson, in the article “Addison in Italy”, quoted two accusations against Addison’s Remarks wielded by two towering figures of the period: Samuel Johnson, “it is not a very severe censure to say that [many parts] might have been written at home”, and Horace Walpole, “Mr. Addison travelled through the poets, and not through Italy”.39 However, Johnson argued that “in a century of travel books, the Remarks was one of the first to extend itself beyond a function as a tourist guidebook or reinforcement of national stereotypes into the realm of moral didactic”.40 According to him, Addison’s key moral concern was to make the English reader learn from the Italian lesson of the slide from ancient glory into present ruin.41 And Addison’s neo-​Latin erudition was an important element, ‘a cultural capital’ employed in the service of a patriotic Briton.

37

Jerry Toner, Homer’s Turk:  How Classics Shaped Ideas of the East. Cambridge, Mass, 2013, 3–​4. 38 Efterpi Mitsi, “A Translator’s Voyage: The Greek Landscape in George Sandys’s Relation of a Journey”, Studies in Travel Writing, vol 12. 2008, issue 1, 62. 39 Donald R. Johnson, “Addison in Italy”, Modern Language Studies, Vol. 6, No 1, 1976, 32. 40 Johnson, “Addison in Italy”, 32. 41 Ibid., 32.

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From the Ars Apodemica to the Grand Tour

While describing Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy in the previous paragraph, the term “Grand Tour” has been used. This term had appeared in written English for the first time only thirty five years prior to the publication of Addison’s book in the posthumously published book of Richard Lassels entitled The Voyage to Italy: or a Compleat Journey through Italy (1670). Lassels, who was an expatriate Roman Catholic priest, who on the title page of this book advertised himself as “Gent., who travelled through Italy five times, as Tutor to several of the English Nobility and Gentry”,42 preceded the book with “The Preface to the Reader Concerning Travelling”, in which he listed and explained nine reasons for and advantages of travelling abroad for young noblemen. The title page, in the manner of the period, also included a blurb summary of the content “[w]‌ith the Characters of the People, and the Description of the Chief Towns, Churches, Monasteries, Tombs, Libraries, Pallaces, Villas. Gardens, Pictures, Statues, and Antiquities. As also of the Interest, Government, Riches, Force, &c. of all the Princes”.43 Lassel’s book is now remembered mostly in the context of it being the first in which the French term “Grand Tour” appeared in English, but in fact it was one of many books with instructions of diverse kinds to travellers which had been published in Europe since the end of the fifteenth century, i.e. from the beginning of, on the one hand, printing in Europe, and on the other, of Renaissance culture. An important part of this culture was the neo-​Latin tradition, which so influenced travel writing. Another important part was the social and cultural phenomenon, which may be generally described as ‘educational travels’ and which has been described with a quite confusing plethora of terms:  the ars apodemica, the Grand Tour, the Cavalier’s Tour, Bildungsreise, Kavalierreise, Kavelierstour. All these educational travels were, albeit in different ways, connected with such social and cultural phenomena as the growth of universities and the growing popularity of university education and travelling. However, the ways in which university scholars, students and ex-​students travelled were different from country to country and from decade to decade. Matis Leibetseder explained that such terms as “Cavalier and Grand Tour are not congruous”, and that “the terminology currently used is […] strongly influenced

42 43

Richard Lassels, The Voyage to Italy: or a Compleat Journey through Italy, Paris: Vincent du Moutier, 1670, title page. Ibid., title page.

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by national-​historical differences”.44 However, for all the social and national differences of such ventures, according to Leibetseder, “it would nevertheless seem accurate to understand the noble-​patrician cavalier’s tour, the students’ peregrinatio academica and the professorial-​scholarly trip as parallel, class-​ based forms of travel that transformed in the eighteenth century to the European tour of the educated classes, the latter being a type of travel that appealed to the nobles and bourgeois alike, and already demonstrated signs of a “composite elite”.45 It is not surprising, because of the geographical and cultural proximity of German and Polish cultures, that Polish scholars, who attempted to cope with the issues of educational journeys in the Renaissance and the Early Modern Period, were prone to using the German terminology and perspective.46 Marek Bratuń, in his paper on the history of the ars apodemica, followed the line of argumentation adopted by an Austrian scholar, Justin Stagl, in his seminal book A History of Curosity: The Theory of Travel 1550–​1800 (1995). According to Stagl, the ars apodemica was conceived of at German Protestant universities around 1570, and its ‘spiritual fathers’ were Hieronymus Turler, the author of De peregrinatione et agor Neapolitano Libri ii (1574), Hilarius Pyrckmair, who wrote Commentariolus de arte apodemica seu vera peregrinandi ratione (1577), and Theodor Zwinger, with his Methodus apodemica (1577).47 The ars apodemica established a set of conventions for academic travellers, who were usually referred to as ‘Humanists’; these conventions transformed the curiosity of these Humanists into a means of “social research”.48 Bratuń, in the footsteps of Stagl, saw the seventeenth century as the period of transformation of the ars apodemica of Humanists into “quickly flourishing literature written for guardians and practically directed at them”.49 Bratuń noticed that Stagl, in one of his footnotes, presented the work of a Pole, Piotr Mieszkowski, as being a good example of this transition in a work published in 1625: Institutio peregrinationum peregrinantibus peroportunata a Petro Mieszkowski edita.50 44

Matis Leibetseder, “Educational Journey, Grand Tour”, European History Online, http://​ieg-​ ego.eu/​en/​threads/​europe-​on-​the-​road/​educational-​journey-​grand-​tour, 3, last accessed 28.05.2019. 45 Ibid. 46 See, e.g., Mączak 1984 and Bratuń 2003. 47 Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel 1550–​1800, London, 47–​57. 48 See Considine 22–​24. 49 Marek Bratuń, “Ars Apodemica:  Narodziny, rozwój, zmierzch”, in Wędrować, pielgrzymować, być turystą:  Podróż w dyskursach kultury, ed. by P.  Kowalski, Opole, 73. “[…]na rzecz bujnie rozwijającej się literatury pisanej przez prywatnych opiekunów i właściwie dla nich przeznaczonej”. 50 Bratuń, “Ars Apodemica”, 73.

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It was also in 1625 that there appeared in England an influential essay by Francis Bacon entitled “Of Travail” (“Of Travel”). It could be treated, together with such earlier treatises on the advantages of foreign travels as Robert Darlington’s A Method for Trauell (1605) and Fynes Moryson’s Of Travelling in Generall (1617), as an English contribution to the ars apodemica. Thus, according to the perspective adopted by scholars such as Stagl and Bratuń, in the course of the seventeenth century the travels of Humanists were replaced by the educational venture of the nobility, which was to be called the Grand Tour in English.51 Richard Lassel’s The Voyage to Italy is clearly an example of early Grand Tour literature in the sense in which Stagl and Bratuń defined it: it was written by an experienced tutor for other prospective tutors (later to be ironically referred to as ‘bear-​leaders’) intending to lead their young, noble (and later also bourgeois) protégées around Italy. The fact that the book was quickly translated into French and published in Paris in 1670, and that two more English editions of it appeared in London in 1698 and 1705 proves that the social and cultural phenomenon which Lassels was the first to call ‘the Grand Tour’ must have been quite popular at the turn of the eighteenth century. Soon the Grand Tour, an educational and social venture, became more and more standardized, and its itinerary became more or less common (Calais, the Loire Valley, Paris, Milan, Florence, Rome, with such alternative detours as Geneva, the German university towns or Naples). Sons of wealthy merchants and manufacturers started to follow their aristocratic colleagues not only to Oxford and Cambridge (where they were marked in records as snobs, sine nobilitate), but also on the Tour itself. The Grand Tour was an educational and social project, which strengthened ‘the cultural hegemony’ of the ruling classes. Although many Grand Tourists, following the advice of Bacon and others, kept their tour diaries and journals, these were published only rarely, usually in the cases when their authors achieved some form of celebrity, as James Boswell did. The Grand Tour, as a social and cultural construct, became textualized in diverse ways by writers like Laurence Sterne or Tobias Smollett, who although not “Grand Tourists” themselves, travelled on the Grand Tour itineraries of France and Italy. The most famous (notorious) representations of the Tour are the accounts of it written by two ‘rebelling’ aristocrats: William 51

Roman Krzywy, on the other hand, in Słownik rodzajów i gatunków literackich, ed. Grzegorz Gazda, Warszawa, 2012, 45–​46. defined “apodemikum as a genre of pedagogical writing which theoretically explained the reasons for foreign journeys developed in Europe in the sixteenth-​eighteenth centuries”. So, according to this definition, the literature of the Grand Tour /​the Kavalierstour is part of the ars apodemica, rather than its successor.

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Beckford’s Dreams and the Waking Thoughts and Incidents (1783), and Lord Gordon Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1811–​1817). James Buzard saw Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Germain de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807) as two late textual representations of the Tour, written in the period when this venture was already slowly petering out, which “established a new paradigm suitable for the dawning age of mass tourism”.52 Although the Grand Tour is no more, its “legacy” in travel writing has survived into the present, as the collection of essays edited by Lisa Colletta in 2015 clearly shows.53 Various aspects of this legacy will also be analysed later in the second chapter of the second part, comparing the travel narratives of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Aldous Huxley. 3

Polish and English Travel Writing in the Vernacular in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

When we apply the ‘travel writing focus’ onto Polish literary tradition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and move from the texts written in Latin to the first ones written in Polish, we will encounter different types of diaries. All types of journeys of the Polish szlachta (nobility) in this period can be divided into educational, diplomatic and pilgrimages; all these journeys were to be scrupulously and daily recorded in diaries. These diaries were not meant for publication, although they often served as sources for different types of publishable travel narratives.54 From our perspective, the most interesting case (both in terms of content, but also of translation and publishing) of literary re-​workings performed on a ‘rudimentary’ diary is that of Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł (called ‘Sierotka’, which means ‘the little orphan’) and his Podróż do Ziemi Świętej, Syrii i Egiptu (Voyage to the Holy Land, Syria and Egypt). Radziwiłł kept a detailed diary of his voyage, which lasted from 1582 till 1584. About a decade later he transformed it into a book of memoirs, which was not published till the beginning of the twentieth century. However, Tomasz Treter, a clergyman, adopted and translated it into Latin, and published this version in 1601. The key aspect of Treter’s adaptation was the introduction of the epistolary convention. Treter divided the whole peregrination into four parts, converted each part into a long letter, written 52

James Buzard, “The Grand Tour and After (1660–​1840)”, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, Cambridge, 49. 53 See Lisa Colletta, The Legacy of the Grand Tour:  New Essays on Travel, Literature and Culture, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015]. 54 Krzywy, Od hodoeperikonu, 126–​133.

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supposedly to an (unnamed) friend, added generically appropriate beginnings and endings, and got rid of the chronological inconsistencies that were the result of Radziwiłł’s use of prolepsis in his original narrative.55 Treter’s Latin rendering of Radziwiłł’s journey was so popular with readers that it was translated into German, Russian and, surprisingly, back into Polish. The Polish re-​ translation, by Andrzej Wargocki, was published in Kraków in 1607 as Perygrynacja albo pielgrzymowanie do Ziemi Świętej (Peregrination or the Pilgrimage to the Holy Land).56 Treter’s alterations point to the high status and popularity of the genre of the so called ‘literary letter’ (as opposed to a ‘private letter’) in the Early Modern Period.57 In the English travel writing context, the form of the ‘literary letter’ was to be used by such literary giants as Daniel Defoe in The Tour of the Whole Island of Britain (1724–​1727) and Tobias Smollett in Travels through France and Italy (1766). Polish poets of the Renaissance period were all very well versed in Greek and Latin literature and literary conventions. As mentioned before, Jan Kochanowski introduced into the Polish context such genres as elegies and epigrams. Polish poets who followed in Kochanowski’s wake were even more ambitious, and in the course of the seventeenth century, as a result of their fascination with Virgil’s Aeneid (and to a lesser extent with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) they tried to introduce into the Polish language the genre of heroic epic poetry. Of a few more or less successful attempts, two such poems are of particular interest here, for they employ first person narration and describe real voyages: Andrzej Zbylitkowski’s Droga do Szwecyjej (A Journey to Sweden) (1597), and Marcin Borzymowski’s Morska nawigacja do Lubeka (A Sea Voyage to Lubeck) (1661). Zbylitkowski was a courtier of King Zygmunt iii Waza, and described the trip he undertook in 1593 with his king and the court from Warsaw down the Vistula to Gdańsk, then across the Baltic to Sweden for the king’s father’s (Johannus iii) funeral and Zygmunt’s coronation as the King of Sweden, and then back to Warsaw. Marcin Borzymowski went from Gdańsk to Lubeck in 1651, and as becoming of a Polish szlachcic (nobleman) of that period, he kept a detailed diary of the trip. Ten years later he converted the diary into a long epic poem. Zbylitkowski’s and Borzymowski’s epic poems exhibit many similarities: they are both strongly indebted to the ancient heroic epic tradition, but at the same time they are influenced by the neo-​Latin tradition of hodoeporikon: for in each of them there is a carefully constructed narrative 55

Kukulski, Leszek (1962) “Posłowie”. in M.K. Radziwiłł „Sierotka”, Podróż do Ziemi Świętej, Syrii i Egiptu (1582–​1584), Warszawa, 1962, 252. 56 Krzywy, Od hodoeperikonu, 147. 57 See Skwarczyńska Teoria listu, Lwów, 304.

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persona who describes his own real journey. Even though, the narration is at times handed over to the ‘rhetorical narrator’, typical of the ancient (heroic) epics, and the peregrinations of Neptune and other deities are dutifully described, the narrative personae’s point of view regularly returns to present this persona as a character in the ‘authentic’ events described. While conceiving of travel writing in the English literary tradition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, travel writing scholars unanimously point to the key role of anthologies of texts that started to be called ‘voyages and travels’. They were collections of texts gathered not for literary purposes, and not because of these texts’ literary merits; their goals were usually more utilitarian in nature. The two most important compilers of such anthologies in England were Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas. However, the idea for such collections had originally came from abroad. In 1550 Giovanni Battista Ramusio, a Venetian scholar, published Delle Navigationi et Viaggi. Ramusio’s collection consisted not only of travel narratives, but also of maps, ships’ logs, and travel instructions. It should be noted that though the Venetians, locked deeply in the Mediterranean, the internal ‘mare nostrum’, “were not involved in the overseas exploration, they were […] ‘profoundly interested spectators’ as scholars and geographers”.58 The first two collections of voyages in English were Richard Eden’s Decades of the Newe Worlde (1555) and Richard Willes’s Historie of Travayle (1577). Richard Hakluyt, in his first anthology entitled Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America (1582), admitted his debt to Ramusio, for in “The List of Authors” appended to Divers Voyages, Ramusio is the only author honoured with the remark “hee gathered many notably things” next to his name.59 Hakluyt, who was an editor and a cartographer and who never went on any voyage himself, gathered in Divers Voyages miscellaneous continental and English materials on northern America. Divers Voyages promoted Sir Humphrey Gilbert in his plan to explore America. Gilbert was Hakluyt’s cousin, and at that time he had a six-​year Royal permission to explore America. The first volume of Hakluyt’s opus magnus, entitled The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589–​1600), was published in 1589,60 a year after 58 59 60

Jerome Randal Barnes, Giovani Battista Ramusio and the History of Discoveries: An Analysis of Ramusio’s Commentary, Cartography and Imaginary in Delle Navigationi et Viaggi Ann Arbor: MI University Microfilms, 2007, 38. Richard Hakluyt(ed.), Divers Voyages Touching the Discouerie of America and Ilands Adjacent, London, 1582, 3. Hukluyt used three nouns to refer to voyages described in his anthology: “navigations, voyages, traffiques”. Travel narratives from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century were commonly described as ‘voyages and travels’. Carl Thompson gives the following

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the Invincible Armada had been defeated. Unlike Divers Voyages, The Principal Navigations was restricted to the representation of achievements of “the English Nation”. Nevertheless, its size was huge; the first volume, for example, consisted of eight hundred and thirty-​four folio pages. Hakluyt promoted colonization based on Protestant proselytizing and economic expansion, hoping that it would undermine Spain’s colonial supremacy. Peter Mancall summarized Hakluyt’s influence and importance in the following way: In the 1580’s he [Hakluyt] became a source of information and inspiration for England’s policy makers, including the queen. By the end of the decade he had achieved international acclaim as one of Europe’s greatest authorities on overseas exploration. By century’s end Hakluyt had solidified his position as the most important promoter of the English settlement of North America.61 Hakluyt’s mission of promoting English explorations overseas was continued by Samuel Purchas, whose opus magnus contained both texts Richard Hakluyt had collected but did not manage to finish before his death, as well as those gathered by Purchas himself; it was all put together in four thematically organized volumes and published in 1625 as Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travels by Englishmen and Others. At least seven more anthologies of travel narratives and documents were published between 1694 and 1732.62 In the long poem entitled “The Ocean’s Love to Cynthia” Sir Walter Raleigh perhaps best expressed the heroic spirit of English explorers in the second half of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth: “to seek new worlds for gold, for praise, for glory”.63 And it is in Sir Walter Raleigh’s prose narrative

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definition of ‘voyages and travels’:  “From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century the most common generic label for what we would now call ‘travel writing’,” (Travel Writing. 206.) As Charles Batten rightly observed, the usage of the term ‘voyages and travels’ in English travel literature of the period is quite confusing, for the distinction that holds true in Italian or French: sea travels—​navigazione, and travels over land viaggi does not hold true in English. Batten points to the text of Richard Lassel’s Voyage of Italy (1670). The word ‘voyage’ denoted travel in general, rather than sea travel in particular. (“Literary Responses”, 130). Peter Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America, New Haven, 2010, 3–​4. William Sherman, “Stirrings and Searchings (1500–​1720)”, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Tim Youngs and Peter Hulme, Cambridge, 2002, 2002, 24. https://​www.poetrynook.com/​poem/​oceans-​love-​cynthia, last accessed 04.03.2019.

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The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empyre of Guiana (1596) that travel writing scholars of the late twentieth and early twenty-​first century found an unusually high degree of the narrative persona’s focus on the self, at the same time admitting, however, that The Discoverie of Guiana may be seen as typical of many travel narratives of this period: The Discoverie was a calculated performance, a work of propaganda, sharing the aims of the hundreds of books and pamphlets on exploration that were turned out in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to proclaim the great success of an expedition, invite subscription for subsequent voyages, attract adventures and emigrants, and solicit government support.64 Mary Baine Campbell saw The Discoverie of Guiana as the first example of travel literature as we know it today: fully narrative, fully inhabited by its narrator, self-​conscious about the problem of presenting difference in terms that neither inadvertently domesticate, nor entirely alienate.65 Casey Blanton, in her introduction to travel writing in the historical perspective, while relying on Campbell’s opinion about The Discoverie of Guiana stressed the narrator’s self-​focus: No stranger to literature, Raleigh consciously fashions a fictionlike narrative of this journey. He withholds the failure of his quest until the end while recounting in detail the history of the search for El Dorado at the beginning. This technique creates a certain amount of tension and at the same time elevates his quest to almost mythic status. Once he begins the story proper, he compresses events, he expands humanistic detail and seems to have a sense of the colonial intrigues that would please his readers. But above all else he fashions the hero of his tale, not only as its organizing principle but also as its spiritual centre. As Mary Campbell rightly suggests, Raleigh portrays himself as a kind of romance hero out of Spenser, a knight who would deliver the natives from the hands of the Spaniards (and would be equally willing to appropriate their gold).66

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Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, New Haven, 1973, 105. Mary Baine Campbell, The Witness, 5. Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World, New York: Routledge, 2002, 10.

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It should be noted that Campbell’s and Blanton’s interpretation of The Discoverie of Guiana as a ‘proto-​travel book’ (and, in fact, also as a proto-​novel) was strongly challenged by Jonathan Sell, who insists that Raleigh’s presence in the text (seen by some critics to offset the absence of El Dorado) should not be seen as making Raleigh “a proto-​novelist or proto-​autobiographer with a privileged and proto-​modern ego and sensibility”.67 According to Sell: [i]‌n Raleigh the writer’s body (and thence the writer himself) is not yet the subject of interest in its own right; rather, experientially inscribed, it is instrumentalized semiotically and transformed into a sign that testifies into the truth of the writer’s representations. Raleigh’s body is the body of evidence—​a rhetorical ploy, not the physiological wrappings of a proto-​ modern subject.68 From the consciously anachronistic and retrospective perspective on the development of the travel book as a genre adopted in this work, the position of Jonathan Sell seems to be a bit too radical. I  do not think that either Mary Campbell or Casey Blanton perceived Raleigh’s self-​creation in The Discoverie of Guiana as being indicative of “the physiological wrappings of a proto-​ modern subject”, and I believe that they would have agreed with Sell that it could be easily called “a rhetorical ploy”. In fact, Campbell, in The Witness and the Other World, traced the origins of such a ‘rhetorical ploy’ in the context of travel writing (again anachronistically and retrospectively) to the fourth century Egeria’s Itinerarium, following the concept of Egeria as a precursor of the medieval ‘didactic’ or ‘representative I’ postulated by Leo Spitzer in 1949. However, it seems that it is not Raleigh’s construction of his persona as a Spenserian knight in The Discoverie of Guiana that should be seen as an early example indicative of the main trends in the travel book’s development once the genre took off in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century, but that of Thomas Coryate in his Crudities. Published a mere sixteen years after The Discoverie of Guiana, in 1611, Crudities described the trip Coryate undertook in 1608, mostly on foot, from London to Venice and back through France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. R.E. Pritchard, one of Coryate’s two biographers, described him in the following manner “a young man of (to adopt a style he would have appreciated) more wit than wealth, and yet of more wealth than wisdom”.69 Wit was an important concept in those days of poets who were 67 Sell, Rhetoric and Wonder, 15. 68 Sell, Rhetoric and Wonder, 15–​16. 69 R.E. Pritchard, Odd Tom Coryate: An English Marco Polo. Stroud, 2013, 5.

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later to be snubbed by John Dryden as ‘metaphysical’ ones, and Coryate was close enough to the ‘witty court’ of King James and also to poets like John Donne and Michael Drayton, who together with fifty-​seven other greater and lesser London literary celebrities of the period wrote their ‘commendatory verses’ in seven languages which embellish the first one hundred and twenty-​one quarto pages of the eight hundred pages that Coryat’s Crudities consists of. Coryate was to write three more travel accounts, one of which was published posthumously after his early death by dysentery in Surat in India. His wit in Crudities hovers over various aspects of his narrative and combines such features as jesting, displays of erudition, pastiche on earlier ‘travels and voyages’ as well as ironic self-​deprecation (or rather, to be exact, the persona’s deprecation). This can be discerned straight from page 152, after all the paratexts (commendatory verses, pages (1–​121) and two orations, one in praise of travel, and the other in praise of ‘the Booke’ (pages 122–​151)) have been presented: I was embarked at Dover, about ten of the clocke in the morning, the fourteenth of May, being Saturday and Whitsun-​eve, Anno 1608, and arrived in Calais (which Cœsar calls Ictius portus, a maritime towne of the part of Picardy, which is commonly called le pais raconquis, that is the recovered Province, inhabited in former times by the ancient Morini* about five of the clocke in the afternoon, after I have varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach, desiring to satiate the gormandaizing pouches of the hungry Haddocks (according as I have hieroglyphically expressed it in the front of my booke) with that wherewith I had superfluously stuffed by selfe at land having made my rumbling belly their capacious aumbrie (* Of whom Virgil speaketh thus: Extreminque hominum Morini, Ænei. 8).70 It is Coryate’s mock-​heroic tone, rather than Raleigh’s heroic style, that the professional novelists of the second half of the eighteenth century, such as Henry Fielding or Tobias Smollett (or Lawrence Sterne), would employ a century and a half later, when they turned to representing their travels in narratives. And the underlying reason for such a state of affairs was the fact that by that time, the age of (heroic) exploration had long gone, and the age of mass tourism was quickly approaching. Fielding, Smollett and Sterne were not on an imperial mission to reach (and conquer) El Dorado. All three of them were middle-​ aged, ailing gentlemen advised by their doctors to recuperate their health (as 70

Thomas Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities, Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1905, vol. 1, 152.

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seemed appropriate and financially viable for middle class gentlemen of that period) by embarking on the trip south in the warmer, Mediterranean climate. And all three of them were too much of professionals to miss the opportunity to allow their writing skills, combined with accumulated literary reputation and fame, pay for their travels. The mode of travel writing in which the narrative persona is central to the narrative that appeared in British travel writing with the appearance of travel books such as Henry Fielding’s A Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon or Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy (the origins of which, as I  argue, might be traced back to Raleigh’s Discoverie of Guiana and Coryat’s Crudities) has been named as ‘sentimental’ by such scholars as Mary Louis Pratt and Casey Blanton. ‘Sentimental’ travel writing has been contrasted with ‘scientific’ travel writing. As Pratt argued in Imperial Eyes, both ‘sentimental’ and ‘scientific’ discourses which developed in the eighteenth century should be dubbed ‘anti-​ conquest’ strategies, as in both scientific and sentimental narratives “European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony”.71 These anti-​conquest “strategies of innocence were constructed in relation to older imperial rhetoric of conquest associated with the absolutist era”72 (as seen, for example, in Raleigh’s openly imperial and expansionist strategy in Discoverie of Guiana). The scientific mode of travel writing developed in England in the seventeenth century, when the older techniques of relating travel experiences, based on Classical learning and rhetoric, were seen as turning traveller writers into ‘travel liars’.73 Both the theoretical and some of the practical aspects of the new way of relating travel were raised in the set of instructions for travellers issued by Robert Hooke, the mathematician and first Curator of Experiments of the (newly founded) Royal Society (of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge) in 1662. Hooke’s instructions to Seamen and Travellers were “to shew them what is pertinent and considerable, to be observed in their Voyages and Abodes, and how to make their Observations and keep Registers or Accounts of them”.74 As Michael McKeon argued, Robert Hooke’s instructions: urge that the authority and criteria for the self-​examination derive not from the overarching truth of a great Author but from the principles of 71 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 9. 72 Ibid. 73 See, e.g., Percy G.  Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–​1800. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962. 74 Quoted in Michael McKeon, The Origin of the English Novel, London: Radius, 1988, 102.

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the materialistic epistemology […] The fundamental trope of this anti-​ rhetorical style is the self-​reflexive insistence on its own documentary candour, as well as on the historicity of the narrative it transparently ­mediates.75 There were many traveller writers in the eighteenth century who managed to combine in their narratives disparate elements of the scientific and sentimental discourses. The most prominent example is that of William Dampier, a naturalist, navigator and explorer on one hand, and a buccaneer on the other. In a series of commercially successful travel accounts, A New Voyage Round the World (1697), Voyages and Descriptions (1699), and A Voyage to New Holland (Part One 1703, Part Two 1709)  Dampier interspersed chapters of objective, naturalistic descriptions with chapters of a buccaneer-​adventurer, which are credited as being direct inspiration for such (fictional) narratives as Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726).76 The development of travel discourse in English and Polish literary traditions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was performed by ‘traveller writers’, according to Jonathan Sell’s distinction. It was in the eighteenth century that ‘travel writers’ began to replace them, and these issues are going to be central in the next chapter. For it was only in the eighteenth century that the modern genres of the travel book and the podróż started to crystalize out of various forms of travel writing and fictional prose. 75 76

Ibid., 104–​105. Kris Lane, “Introduction”, in William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, Warwick, NY, 2007, 5.

­c hapter 3

The Crucial Eighteenth Century: the Birth of the Genres of the Travel Book and the Podróż Tim Youngs, in The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing (2013), was not as radical as I  was in Travellers, Novelists and Gentlemen (also published in 2013) to postulate the ‘rise’ of the travel book as a genre in the course of the eighteenth century in Britain, paralleling the process of the ‘rise of the novel’ as described by Ian Watt back in 1957. Nevertheless, while describing the developments of travel writing in the eighteenth century, Youngs started by foregrounding the close connections between novels and travel books, not only in that period, but in the historical perspective. He observed that such books as Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), as well as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–​67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768) are among the fictions whose plots are structured around the travels of their heroes and that draw on the conventions of the picaresque. Their mock-​heroic narrators experience misfortunes that are echoed by the mishaps of twentieth-​century travel narrators.1 Subsequently, Youngs pointed out that many of the fictions written in that period are written in the manner of travel books and at least two of them, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 1735), “have outlived their times and grown into powerful cultural myths. The interrelationship between the novel and travel writing helped forge the individual narrative voice that remains familiar to us now”.2 And finally, according to Tim Youngs, [t]‌he overlapping of fact and fiction at this time is particularly enabled by the shared traits of the picaro. Although the protagonists of the eighteenth-​century travel book tend to be of a higher social class than their novelistic counterparts, they, too, are often rascals. In narrative tone

1 Tim Youngs, The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, Cambridge, 2013, 38. 2 Ibid.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004429611_005

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and style, travel books of the period also exhibit characteristics of the picaresque.3 Daniel Defoe’s role in the development of early travel books was as considerable as was his role as a ‘founding father’ of the novel genre. His Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–​1727) equalled the popularity of Robinson Crusoe. It remains an important source for historians and economists studying eighteenth-​century Britain.4 It exhibited features which were later taken up by the subsequent generation of professional novelists and travel writers, such as Fielding and Smollett: a lucid style and Protestant dislike of ‘Papists’ mixed with staunch British patriotism and the conviction of Britons’ moral superiority:  “without boasting, we may venture to say, we are at least upon a level with the best of our neighbours, perhaps above them in morals”,5 he stated in the preface to the first volume. Yet, there exists a considerable difference between Defoe’s Tour … and Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon or Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy, written some three decades later, because Defoe’s narrative is much more ‘scientific’ than the other two, and therefore less ‘sentimental’. Defoe’s narrative persona in A Tour is present but is not central; it is the relatively recently united Great Britain which is the focus of the narrative, England and Scotland described with patriotic pride and with reference to his own extensive travels over the island (as a tax collector and a secret agent of king William), and also to other books on Britain’s geography, history, economy and culture. It is much more of a guide book than either Fielding’s or Smollett’s travel books. The title page of the original 1724 first volume of A Tour shows the narrative’s scope: “I. Description of the Principal Cities, and Towns, their Situation, Magnitude, Government and Commerce; ii. The Customs, Manners, Speech and also the Exercises, Diversions and Employment of the People; iii. The Produce and Improvements of the Lands, the Trade, and Manufactures; iv. The Sea Ports and Fortifications, the Course of Rivers and Inland Navigation; v. The Public Edifices, Seats and Palaces of the Nobility and Gentry”.6 The additional information placed towards the bottom of the title makes the guide book-​like character of A Tour explicit, “Particularly Fitted for the Such as Desire to Travel over the Island”.7 And underneath it we 3 Ibid., 39. 4 Pat Rogers, “Introduction”, in Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Britain, London, 1986, 9–​11. 5 Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, vol. I, London, 1724, 5–​6. 6 Ibid., title page. 7 Ibid.

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have the following information about the author: “By a Gentleman”.8 So Defoe remained hidden under the guise of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘a gentleman’, whereas with Fielding and Smollett we enter the age of professional celebrity writers using their names as trademarks. As suggested in Travellers, Novelists and Gentlemen,9 Fielding’s role as the author of Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, in establishing the separate foundations for two genres, that of the novel and that of the travel book, is particularly important. Whereas writers like Defoe (in Robinson Crusoe) or Swift (in Gulliver’s Travels) had used the non-​fiction conventions of the travel book to ‘authenticate’ the ‘realistic’ nature of their fictions, in the prefaces to his novels Fielding exposed their (realistic) fictionality, and discursively presented it as an asset rather than a liability. His insistence on conforming to the rules of ‘probability’ rather than mere ‘possibility’ is crucial to the development of the novel as we know it. Fielding was aware of what he wanted to do in prose fiction and understood the novelty of his undertaking in a way many of his predecessors had not. He was not modest about pointing this out, either. “I shall not look on myself as accountable to any court of critical jurisdiction whatever; for as I am, in reality, the founder of a new province of writing, so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein”.10 The manoeuvre to call fiction ‘fiction’ adhered to in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones left Fielding with room for the new non-​fiction, a first person narrative of the persona’s own travels, that would in the course of the next century acquire the name ‘travel book’ In the Preface to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon Fielding again was not very modest. He was convinced that he was inaugurating a new type of writing and, therefore, has: the liberty to make the laws he pleases, therein I conceive, all that vast pile of books which pass under the names of voyages, travels, adventures, lives, memoirs, histories, etc., some of which a single traveler sends into the world in many volumes, and others are, by judicious booksellers, collected into vast bodies in folio, and inscribed with their own names, as if they were indeed their own travels: thus unjustly attributing to themselves the merit of others. Now, from both these faults we have endeavored to steer clear in the following narrative; which, however the contrary may be insinuated by ignorant, unlearned, and fresh-​water critics, who have never traveled either in books or ships, I do solemnly declare doth, in my own impartial 8 Ibid. 9 Moroz, Travellers, Novelists and Gentlemen, 101–​103 and 110–​114. 10 Henry Fielding The History of Tom Jones, Harmonsworth, 1979, 88.

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opinion, deviate less from truth than any other voyage extant; my Lord Anson’s alone being, perhaps, excepted. Some few embellishments must be allowed to every historian; for we are not to conceive that the speeches in Livy, Sallust, or Thucydides, were literally spoken in the very words in which we now read them.11 Fielding argues that now, as he is writing ‘true history’, he is writing a superior form of narrative (in the prefaces to his novels he made claims totally contradictory to this one): But, in reality, the Odyssey, the Telemachus, and all of that kind, art to the voyage-​writing I here intend, what romance is to true history, the former being the confounder and corrupter of the latter.12 The two central ‘rules’ of the travel book postulated by Fielding in The Journal’s Preface are: firstly, the declaration to be telling a truthful account of a journey (or journeys) which really happened, and secondly to give oneself licencia poetica for the use of “some few embellishments”. The first ‘rule’ could be defined as a ‘referential pact’, a term which François Hourmant coined by analogy to Philip Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’: the author’s declaration, usually in the preface or introduction to his non-​fiction narrative, to be telling the truth, a pact that is central not only to autobiography, but also to other autobiographical genres like the travel book. According to Charles Forsdick, the ‘referential pact’, which the narrator creates from the outset with the reader is implicit but also integral to the genre of non-​fiction travel narratives. The second ‘rule’ makes for the distinctly ‘artistic’ aspect of the travel book in its British literary type; discernible in the travel books from Fielding and Smollett, through Samuel Johnson, William Beckford and Alexander Kinglake to Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan Raban. As Fielding stated, “it is sufficient that every fact have its foundation in truth […] and when it is so, a good critic will be so far from denying all kind of ornament of stile and diction, or even of circumstances to his author”.13 The growth of the market for novels, spurred by the best-​selling successes of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne and others, was connected with the growth of the popularity of the writers themselves, whose names started to be used as marketing assets, trademarks. Although the term 11

Henry Fielding, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, in: From Fact to Fiction: Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne), Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1987, 161. 12 Ibid., 159. 13 Fielding, The Journal, 161.

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‘celebrity’ in its present usage would not enter the English language for the next one hundred years, the phenomenon we tend to refer to as ‘celebrity culture’ was already fast developing. As Leo Braudy testified: the history of fame is inseparable from the history of human self-​ consciousness, on the part of both the aspirant and the audience. With the eighteenth century, we first discover an urge that seems comparable to our own […] Fame was beginning to be a matter of talent, learning and personal virtue rather than of birth and inherited rank.14 The majority of British novelists and men (and women)-​of-​letters in the second half of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century followed Fielding and his Journal of the Voyage to Lisbon in the commercial utilization of their travels (usually undertaken for health or pleasure) and their fame as bestselling authors in the form of travel books. Tim Youngs, in The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, adorned the chapter on the eighteenth century with a quote from Mary Wollstonecraft’s introduction to her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796) “I found I could not avoid being continually the first person—​‘the little hero of each tale.’ ”15 In fact, the shift that travel writing underwent in the British literary tradition in the eighteenth century, which has been variously described by scholars as the shift from ‘scientific to sentimental’ travel writing (Pratt, Blanton), ‘Enlightenment to Romantic’ travel writing (Thompson), ‘instruction to pleasure’ as the main principle behind travel writing (Batten), from the perspective adopted in the present study, has been most aptly described by Barbara Korte in her Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (2000) as the shift from ‘object-​oriented’ to ‘subject-​oriented’ travel writing;16 the shift from the focus on description of the world out there, to the focus of unique ‘self’ describing the world out there. As explorations turned to tourism, the role of a narrative persona increased; it was no longer the exotic, foreign lands, but the celebrity persona of the narrator that became “the unique selling point”, as marketing experts refer to the features of a product that distinguishes it in a market overfilled with seemingly similar products. While turning to travel books, the professional writers in the second half of the eighteenth century were all confronted by the following dilemma: how to present (although ‘auto-​create’ and ‘construct’ seem to be more appropriate 14 Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, New York, 1997, 587. 15 Quoted in Youngs, The Cambridge Introduction, 38. 16 Korte, Travel Writing, 4–​6.

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terms) oneself as a respectable member of one’s (middle) class, but also as a unique, original individual capable of sustaining the interest of the readers. It was, obviously, not only the (middle) class of which you were (or aspired to be) a member, but also your gender that mattered. The male writers would generally streamline themselves in the ‘middle class groove’ after, what we may now, from our perspective as twenty-​first century scholars of travel writing, consider as two failed attempts to get away from the aura of gentleman’s respectability prevalent in this period. The first of these attempts was undertaken by Tobias Smollett in Travels through France and Italy (1766). Smollett, similarly to Fielding a decade before him, travelled to the south of Europe, on his doctors’ advice, to recuperate in the warm climate. Smollett relied on the popularity of the epistolary form in constructing the narrative of Travels through France and Italy, and on the concept of a picaro in the construction of his own narrative persona. Smollett’s earlier success as a novelist had been exclusively connected with picaresque novels, which had been loosely based on his own travels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), exploiting Smollett’s experiences as a naval surgeon on ships bound for the West Indies, or The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), making use of his tour of France. In April 1763, an ailing Smollett, after the death of his only daughter, decided to recuperate his and his wife’s mental and physical health by going to the warmer climate of the Mediterranean. They spent almost two years there, sojourning mostly in Nice, but they also visited Rome, Florence and Italy. Travels through France and Italy, published one year after their return to Britain, was described by The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 volumes (published between 1907 and 1921) as “one of the most entertaining books of travel extant, and a mine of information, on the whole remarkably accurate, concerning the natural phenomena, history, social life, economics, diet and morals of the places described”.17 It is true that Travels through France and Italy is a “mine of information”, a book showing how strong the connection of travel books with the ‘scientific’ (as opposed to ‘sentimental’) discourse were in this period. The ‘scientific’ aspect of this book was advertised in the extended title: Travels through France and Italy Containing Observations on Character, Customs, Religion, Government, Police, Commerce, Arts, and Antiquities. With a Particular Description of the Town, Territory, and Climate of Nice. To which is Added, A Register of the Weather, Kept During a Residence of Eighteen Months in that City. 17

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–​21).Volume X.  The Age of Johnson. II. Fielding and Smollett. § 25. Travels through France and Italy. http://​www.bartleby.com/​220/​0225.html, last accessed 04. 03. 2019.

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Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy, following the fashion of that period, combined things considered useful (‘instruction’) with things considered ‘pleasurable’. The former, apart from the ‘scientific’ angle, also consisted of the ‘moral’ one. For an important aspect of Smollett’s narrative persona was an attitude which Frank Felsenstein described as that of a “sturdy native moralist”.18 Smollett, a Scot by birth, a Briton by choice, who constructed his narrative persona as a proud member of the British middle-​class, cherished showing the moral faults and weaknesses of the French and the Italian nations, as well as the moral degradation of Catholic aristocrats and priests, but also of young British aristocrats on their Grand Tour, “ignorant, petulant, rash and profligate, without any knowledge or experience of their own”.19 But suchinstruction, both scientific and moral, was to be ‘alleviated’ by a ‘pleasurable’ component. For Smollett, a successful picaresque humourist-​novelist, the most obvious way to do so was to furnish his own persona with the features of a splenetic picaro. He was certainly ill and filled with grief when he was travelling in France, but as Falsenstein demonstrated, Smollett needed a narrator with an exaggerated bad temper, without which his “adventures on the road would hardly be worth recounting; instead, by giving vent to his spleen, he magnifies seemingly unimportant incidents until they engulf his whole personality”.20 Fielding’s and Smollett’s eccentric, splenetic personae set a trend characterized by Katherine Turner: “by presenting a distinctive, even downright odd, narrative persona, travel writers would simultaneously add marketable novelty to their texts, and testify to the liberty which British society offered for the infinite variety of its subjects”.21 However, as Smollett was to find out, there was also a danger lurking in this kind of narrator’s splenetic eccentricity. After the initial tranche of positive reviews praising Smollett mostly for his sturdy British patriotism, there came two attacks on Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy persona, which were (as it appears from the vantage point of twenty-​first century travel writing studies) to warn travel writers who followed Smollett to avoid in their self-​construction implementing such features which might be perceived as ‘ungentlemanly’.

18

Frank Felsenstein, “Introduction”, in Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, ed. Frank Felsenstein, Oxford, 1979, xxii. 19 Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, ed. Frank Felsenstein, Oxford, 1979, 252–​ 252. For an analysis of the rise of British nationalism in the context of 18th century travel narratives see:  Katherine Turner British Travel Writers in Europe; 1750–​1800:  Authorship, Gender and National Identity, Aldershot, 2001. 20 Felsenstein, “Introduction”, xxi. 21 Turner, British Travel Writers, 43.

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The first attack came from a fellow novelist and a fellow valetudinarian traveller through France and Italy—​Laurence Sterne (in fact, Smollett and Sterne accidently met in Italy). In his Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, published in 1768, two years after Smollett’s Travels, Sterne famously (or rather notoriously) introduced a character meaningfully called ‘ “the learned Smelfungus”, believed to be directly based on Tobias Smollett. The learned Smelfungus’ travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on, but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he pass’d by was discoloured or distorted. He wrote an account of them, but ’twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings. […] I  met Smelfungus in the grand portico of the Pantheon:—​he was just coming out of it ’Tis nothing but a huge cockpit’, said he …22 Smelfungus/​Smollett as a narrator is mocked by Sterne not only for distorting “every object he passed” with his own smelly, mushroom-​like spleen, but also for his pretences to be a man of science, creating his ‘learned’ theories in areas where his expertise was very dubious, such as the climate of the south of France. Later British novelists, both male and female, while turning to travel, would avoid both excessive spleen and excessive scientific discourse in their constructions of narrative personae. Smollett’s persona’s excessive and performative spleen formed the brunt of an attack on another travel writer, Philip Thicknesse, who waged war on Smollettt in his Observations on the Customs and Manners of the French Nation (1766) and Useful Hints to Those Who Make the Tour of France (1768). Thicknesse’s books are early examples of what would later be referred to as ‘traveller versus tourist discourse’. Thicknesse focused on making a distinction between ‘true gentlemen’ (like himself) travelling for the superior reasons of erudition, refinement and Culture, and “low bred-​rich people” (like Smollett), travelling in order to be seen travelling.23 Thicknesse’s argument against Smollett was as follows: Smollett’s low opinion of France and the French is the result of his mixing with the wrong set of people, like postilions and inn-​keepers, not aristocrats, meeting whom Thicknesse reported with great relish in his own travel books. Moreover, quarrelling with innkeepers is ‘vulgar’ and not becoming of a gentleman; and this was a very serious accusation in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth 22 23

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Harmonsdworth, 1967, 51–​52. Philip Thicknesse, Observations on the Customs and Manners of the French Nation, London, 1766, 8.

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century, especially for professional writers who had themselves been socially ‘upwardly mobile’. Sterne’s Sentimental Journey through France and Italy was a response to Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy. It should be borne in mind, while dealing with Sterne’s book in the generic context of the distinction between the genres of the novel and of the travel book, that both these genres were in 1768 (and for a quite a while later) in stadu nascendi, and the distinctions between them were much more fuzzy and blurred. As Percy G.  Adams authoritatively stated: “[a]‌lthough Sterne’s Sentimental Journey is now a ‘novel’, in the eighteenth century it was a travel book and inspired a huge school of sentimental travel accounts”.24 Sterne decided to make Reverend Mr. Yorick someone discursively and ontologically different from himself (although sharing many of his features), which makes us now classify his book as a novel rather than a travel book. Putting Yorick at one more (fictional) remove from the novelist Reverend Laurence Sterne gave him more room for ironical criticism of different ways of travelling and describing these travels in writing prevalent in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. Sterne was also not to spare irony while describing the new type of traveller he was constructing Yorick to be: that of a ‘Sentimental Traveller’, a persona too refined to be regularly showing spleen and jaundice. The debate that rumbled on at the end of the 1760s in the British literary press in which the travel books, narrative personae and ‘celebrity personae’ of Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne and Philip Thicknesse were involved, demonstrates not only the dynamism with which the new genre of the travel book was developing, but also the centrality of the issues of ideology, class, gender and nationality, and their impact on ‘masculine self-​fashioning’. As Carl Thompson concluded:  “travel has often been regarded as an important mode or rite of masculine self-​fashioning”.25 The narrative personae of Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy, Thicknesse’s Observations, and Sterne’s Yorick from his Sentimental Journey, and the fervour with which their integrity was attacked and defended shows that the type of masculinity often referred to as ‘hegemonic’ was being forged, and was, in fact, part of a larger process that lasted in the social context of Britain at least throughout the eighteenth century and which ended with the inclusion of ‘upwardly mobile’ characters like Fielding or Smollett in the category of ‘gentlemen’, in spite of the protests of ‘real’ gentlemen in the old sense (that is, gentlemen by birth, rather than

24 Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, Lexington, 1983, 198. 25 Thompson, Travel Writing, 173.

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by merit) like Thicknesse. Sterne’s Yorick may be viewed as one more ‘alternative’ version of middle-​class masculinity, based on ‘sensibility’ and refinement, rather than birth. Before the eighteenth century drew to a close there appeared one more such ideology, and with it one more type of traveller and travel writer: ‘the picturesque traveller’. Similarly to ‘sentimental travellers’, ‘picturesque travellers’ were often accused by conservative contemporary critics as “effeminate, emasculated figures”.26 The ‘founding father’ of ‘picturesque aesthetics’ was a renowned theoretician but also a practitioner of the movement, William Gilpin. It was his first travel book, entitled Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales & Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty: Made in Summer of the Year 1770, published in 1782, which set the standard for this type of writing, with its insistence on “examining the face of the country by the rules of the picturesque beauty”.27 In his ‘theoretical’ essay “On Picturesque Travel” (1792) Gilpin specified the object of picturesque travel as beauty of every kind which either art, or nature may produce […] This great object we pursue through the scenery of nature, and examine it by the rules of painting. We seek it among all the ingredients of landscape.28 Gilpin travelled himself, and advised his followers to travel, with a contraption called a ‘Claude glass’, a small mirror, slightly convex in shape, which has the effect of abstracting a subject reflected in it from the surroundings, simplifying and reducing the colour range of scenery to give them a ’painterly quality’. Claude glasses were used by picturesque travellers to distil the ‘painterly beauty’ from the scenery that would often contain man-​made, or even urban elements, considered not appropriate and spoiling the proportions. While describing the Severn valley Gilpin commented: Many of these hills, which enclose the vale of Severn on this side, furnish landscapes themselves, without borrowing assistance from the vale. The woody valleys, which run winding among them, present many pleasing pastoral scenes. The clothing country about Stroud, is particularly 26 Ibid., 175. 27 William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales & Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty: Made in Summer of the Year 1770, London 2005, 17. 28 William Gilpin, Three Essays:  On Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape; to which is added a Poem on Landscape Painting, London, 1792, 42.

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diversified in this way: though many of these valleys are greatly injured in a picturesque light, by introducing scenes of habitation and industry. A cottage, a mill, or a hamlet among trees, may often add beauty to the rural scene: but when houses are scattered through every part, the moral sense can never make a convert of the picturesque eye.29 In his own travel books Gilpin extensively used aquatint illustrations (sixteen in Observations on the River Wye) to illustrate both the notions of picturesque beauty and his own painterly talents. They became important paratextual elements of travel books, paving the way for daguerreotypes and photographs later on in the nineteenth century. Picturesque travel was soon ‘institutionalized’ into the social and cultural phenomenon labelled as ‘the Home Tour’, a phrase coined in reference to the Grand Tour. Unlike the Grand Tour, however, whose key destinations were places of culture in France and Italy, the Home Tour’s key destinations were places of natural beauty located mostly on the peripheries of the British isles. Although scenic travel “was initially intended to be an essentially individual and subjective experience, it was soon transformed into a standardized pilgrimage to selected beauty spots—​not least because of the many books published about this kind of touring”.30 It is not surprising that with the rise of the Home Tour and the growing popularity of picturesque travel books, a satirical and ironic backlash followed (similar to the earlier ironic reactions to the Grand Tour, and later ironic reactions to ‘mass Tourism’). The Tour of Doctor Syntax, in Search of the Picaresque is a mock-​heroic poem which was published in 1812. It satirizes scenic tourism and the commercial aspects of travel books which became its results. Dr Syntax, a burnt-​out teacher of Greek and Latin, announces to his wife that he has discovered the “golden road to fame and money”: I’ll make a TOUR—​and then I’ll WRITE IT You well know what my pen can do, And I’ll employ my pencil too; I’ll ride and write and sketch and print, And thus create a real mint; I’ll prose it here, I’ll verse it there, And picturesque it everywhere,

29 Gilpin, Observations, 22. (my italics). 30 Korte, English Travel Writing, 80.

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I’ll do what all have done before; I think I shall—​and somewhat more.31 An interesting example of the flexibility of the format of the new genre in the second half of the eighteenth century are two travel books which are the results of an eighty-​three-​day-​long trip to Scotland and the Hebrides undertaken by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell in the late summer and early autumn of 1783. Johnson’s travel book, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, was published in 1775, while Boswell’s Journal of the Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson was published only in 1785, after Johnson’s death, “as a pre-​view of the large scale biography he was planning”.32 The difference in focus between these two travel books was quickly spotted by Ann Seward, a poet and a friend of Boswell who wrote to him soon after his book was published: In one [Johnson’s book] we perceive, through a medium of solemn and sublime eloquence, in what light Scotland, her nobles, her professors, and her chieftains appeared to the august wanderer, the other how the growling philosopher appeared to them.33 At the time of writing his travel book Johnson was in his sixties and was a literary celebrity whose life was closely followed by the press on a daily basis.34 He used his huge erudition as a central theme of his narrative. On the one hand, we have a philosophical “wide ranging inquiry into the nature of historical change”,35 and on the other, a vessel to voice his eloquent opinion on such matters as the (in)authenticity of Ossian’s poems presented in an attempt to expose Macpherson’s literary hoax.36 In his travel book Boswell used the celebrity status of Johnson, whose name first appears in the title and appears regularly throughout the narrative. So, in a sense, he was basking in Johnson’s celebrity to (successfully) forge his own. Johnson’s and Boswell’s trip was not 31 32 33 34 35 36

William Combe, The Tour of Doctor Syntax, in Search of the Picaresque, Philadelphia, 1865, 17. Elizabeth A. Bohls and Ian Duncan, ed., Travel Writing 1700–​1830: An Anthology, Oxford, 2005, 150. Quoted in Pat Rogers’ “Introduction” in Johnson and Boswell in Scotland: A Journey to the Hebrides, ed. Pat Rogers, New Haven, 1993, x. Stephen Lynn, “Johnson’s Critical Reception”, in Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. George Clingham, Cambridge, 1997, 240–​241. Bohls and Duncan, Travel Writing, 150. See Thomas M.  Curley, Samuel Johnson and the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland, Cambridge, 2009. Particularly the chapter entitled “Searching for the truth in the Highlands: Macpherson throws down the gauntlet” (82–​122).

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as inauspicious as Fielding’s earlier voyage to Lisbon, but the narrative focus in both their travel books testifies to the persistence of the ‘sentimental’ shift in British travel writing in the second half of the eighteenth century. The second half of the eighteenth century was also a period when women were beginning to make their contribution to British travel writing. An aristocrat, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, is now perceived as one of the first women-​writers; often referred to, quoted and anthologized as a precursor not only of travel discourse, but also of early Orientalist and feminist discourses. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters was first published in 1763 (a year after her death), and is based on her journey to the Ottoman Empire undertaken almost half a century earlier, in 1716 to 1718, when Lady Mary had accompanied her husband, the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte. The Turkish Embassy Letters derives from two principal sources—​the letters that Lady Mary wrote to her friends and relations in England while she was abroad; and a journal which she kept during her travels in 1716; they were edited by Lady Mary shortly after her return from Turkey with the intention of having them published posthumously. As the eighteenth century drew to a close there appeared professional (or semi-​professional) women writers, who joined the ‘middle-​class travel book mainstream’. One was Ann Radcliffe, who became famous for her Gothic novels set in France and Italy. In 1794, when her masterpiece The Mysteries of Udolpho was published, she embarked on a trip to Holland and Germany, and upon her return to Britain went on to tour the Lake District. These peregrinations resulted in A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany, with a Return down the Rhine, To which Are Added Observations During the Tour to the Lakes of Lancashire, West Moreland and Cumberland, published in 1795. This book is interesting and symptomatic from the perspective of gender and its influence on the developments of the travel book genre as such. Firstly, Radcliffe experimented with the form of the narration, switching it from first person singular to first person plural, accounting for it thus in the paratext of the Introduction: The Author begs leave to observe, in explanation made of the use of the plural term in the following pages, that, her journeying having been performed in the company of her nearest relative and friend, the account of it has been written so much from their mutual observation, that there would be a deception in permitting the book to appear, without some acknowledgement, which might distinguish it from works entirely of her own. The title page would, therefore, have contained the joint names of her husband and herself, if this mode of appearing before the public,

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besides being thought by that relative a greater acknowledgement than was due to his share of the work, had not seemed liable to the imputation of a design to attract attention by extraordinary novelty. It is, however, necessary for her own satisfaction that some notice should be taken of this assistance. She may, therefore, be permitted a few words as to this subject, by saying that when the economical and political conditions are touched upon in the following work, the remarks are less her own than elsewhere.37 It seems that even though the husband’s name is not listed on the title page, Ann Radcliffe, a professional writer after all, must have hoped to “attract attention by the extraordinary novelty” of employing “we” throughout the narrative. Another telling point of this statement is the adherence to what might be called a ‘gendered division of expertise’. She admits that “when the economical and political conditions are touched upon in the following work, the remarks are less her own than elsewhere”, thus explicitly ceding the economic and political discourses as areas in which her husband is an expert, at the same time implicitly suggesting that in some other areas “the remarks are more her own”. These areas, as the book reveals, are connected with her skills as a creative writer, competent in applying various conventions of such writing, for example, gothic or aesthetic ones. In Travel Writing 1700–​1830:  An Anthology, the editors Elizabeth Bohls and Ian Duncan included a fragment from Radcliffe’s Journey Made in the Summer of 1794; the fragment is entitled “Cologne” and is introduced in the following way: As they retrace their route down the Rhine, the travellers find themselves hurrying to escape the tide of war between France and the Dutch and Austrian allies, in a nocturnal voyage that might have featured in one of Radcliffe’s own novels.38 In the second part of her travel book, dealing with the trip to the Lake District, Ann Radcliffe often relies on the Burkean aesthetic dichotomy of sublime and beautiful, as in this description of the second largest lake in England: “In these 37

38

Ann Radcliffe, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany, with a Return down the Rhine, To which Are Added Observations During the Tour to the Lakes of Lancashire, West Moreland and Cumberland. Dublin:  William Porter, 1795, v. Travel Writing 1700–​1830: An Anthology, ed. Elizabeth A. Bohls and Ian Duncan, Oxford, 2009, 57 (my italics).

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views of Ullswater, sublimity and greatness are the predominating characters, though beauty often glows upon the Western bank”.39 In 1795, when Radcliffe’s travel book was published describing her summer journey of 1794, another professional woman writer was travelling in Scandinavia. Mary Wollstonecraft’s own travel book was published in the following year. Tone Brekke and John Mee note in their introduction to the recent Oxford University Press edition of this book: By the time she went to Scandinavia in June 1795, the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft was an established professional writer […] Although she is still better known for her enthusiastic defence of the French Revolution in Vindications of the Rights of Men (1790) and even more famous for her ground-​breaking feminism of Vindications of the Rights of Women (1792), Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796) was the book best received by her contemporaries and can still claim to be among her greatest achievements.40 Wollstonecraft’s travel book consists of twenty-​five letters, in which a great variety of themes, great and small, are dealt with: divorce laws, prison reform, sublime views or clothing fashions. Letters Written During a Short Residence may be viewed as a continuation of the tradition of a ‘moral epistolary travel book’ as practiced by such great luminaries of British literature of the preceding period as: Smollett (Travels through France and Italy, 1766), Johnson (A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 1775), or Boswell (Journal of the Tour of the Hebrides, 1785). At the same time, Wollstonecraft’s book is unique in its blending of the social, philosophical and aesthetic musings of an exquisite mind with the passions of a woman coming to the conclusion that she was being deserted by her lover.41 After all, she undertook the Scandinavian trip 39 Radcliffe, A Journey, 418. 40 Tone Brekke and John Mee, “Introduction”, in Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Oxford, 2009, x. 41 It is worth noting at this point that Mary Wollstonecraft, unlike, for example, Ann Radcliffe, challenges rather than follows Edmund Burke’s aesthetics. While Burke privileges the sublime (associated with masculinity, awe and strength) over the beautiful (associated with femininity and weakness), for Wollstonecraft the sublime is associated with sterility and the beautiful with fertility, see Jeanne Moskal “The Picturesque and the Affectionate in Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Norway”, Modern Lanugage Quarterly, 52, 1991, 263–​294. For the most comprehensive study on women’s role in the shaping of aesthetic discourse in the course of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, see Elizabeth Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–​1818, Cambridge, 1995.

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in order to save her relationship with Gilbert Imlay by attempting to recover his ship filled with goods, which had been stolen apparently by Scandinavian thieves/​pirates. On her trip Wollstonecraft not only did not manage to retrieve the ship, but also learnt that Imlay was not eager to continue the relationship with her. Wollstonecraft opted to introduce her travel book with the paratext of a preface (which she, or the publisher, poignantly entitled “Advertisement”); it begins in the following manner: The writing of travels, or memoirs, has ever been a pleasant employment; for vanity or sensibility always renders it interesting. In writing these desultory letters, I found I could not avoid being continually the first person—​‘the little hero of each tale’. I tried to correct this fault, if it be one, for they were designed for publication; but in proportion as I arranged my thoughts, my letters, I found, became stiff and affected. I, therefore, determined to let my reflections and remarks flow unrestrained, as I perceived that I could not give the just description of what I saw, but by relating different objects had produced on my mind and feelings while the impression was still strange.42 This first paragraph of the “Advertisement”, taken together with the very precise, professional construction of the whole text of Letters Written During the Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark seems to be an apt summary of the state of development of the genre of the travel book in British literary tradition at the end of the eighteenth century. A  professional woman writer explicitly creates and foregrounds herself as “the little hero of each tale”, hoping that it is her representation of her personality and her eloquently presented ideas which will offset the fact that the journey described is not an epic voyage to a distant and/​or exotic land, but a description of a “short residence” in an area previously considered unattractive for travellers and tourists alike. It was written for money, and got Mary Wollstonecraft out of debt. It was translated into German, Swedish, Dutch and Portuguese, was published in America, and reissued in a second edition in 1802.43 It influenced Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley, when she was writing her own travel book History of a Six Week’s Tour (1817),44 and was a major inspiration for important

42 43 44

Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Oxford, 2009, 3. See, e.g., Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. London, 2000, 369–​370. See Betty T. Bennett, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction. Baltimore, 1998, 26–​27.

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Victorian women travellers and travel writers such as Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsley.45 The dynamic development of the genres of the novel and the travel book (as well as another ‘self’ centred genre, that of the autobiography, the development of which, however, is beyond the scope of the present study) has been traditionally attributed both by historians and by historians of literature to the economic and social development of Britain in that period, to its mercantile, imperialistic expansion, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the century, and the growth of the importance of the middle-​class, spurred by the fast growing literary market, executed from its beginnings by (often aspiring and/​or upwardly mobile) members of the middle class, directed at the same fast growing (in numbers and affluence) middle class. On the other hand, the political, economic and social situation in Poland’s Commonwealth of Two Nations throughout the eighteenth century was that of decline and a slide into loss of independence at the end of the century. As mentioned before, the economic potentials of Poland and England in the middle of the sixteenth century were similar (as were their populations). Both countries underwent a series of protracted and bloody wars at the end of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century, but whereas in England (Great Britain after 1707) the ‘bloodless revolution’ of 1688 led to internal peace and a concentration of efforts on imperial mercantile (but also military) expansion, Poland’s position became weaker and weaker, due to the inability of internal social and economic reforms, as well as the quick ascension to economic and military power of Poland’s neighbours: Russia, Prussia and Austria, which were keen to capitalize on Poland’s weaknesses. Prussia’s formal annexation of the Polish territories on the Baltic coast (the so called Pomorze gdańskie, the area around Gdańsk/​Danzig) happened only as a result of the second partition of Poland in 1793, but as far back as the long trzecia wojna północna (Third Northern War) 1700–​1721, Poland’s ties with the region had been severely weakened, which meant that the prospects of maritime explorations (and their potential literary exploitation) had become even rarer than before. The Orient, both in the form of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East with the Holy Land, was for Poles the only direction throughout the eighteenth century which generated regular travel and travel narratives. Polish mercantile and military contacts with the Ottoman Empire led to the paradoxical

45

See Richard Holmes, “Introduction”, in A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. New York, 1987, 41.

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situation in which the lavish lifestyle and sartorial behaviour of the Turkish elites were adopted by the Polish nobility and became an indispensable (and crucial) part of the so called kultura sarmacka (Sarmatian culture) on the one hand, but on the other hand, the conviction of the Polish nobility of the superiority of the Polish nation as the only true defender of the Christian faith (Antemurale Christianitas) over the świat bisurmański (‘lowly Muslim world’) led to what Stanisław Burkot called “a spiritual and also economic isolation”.46 Mikołaj Sierotka Radziwiłł’s Podróż do Ziemi Świętej, Syrii i Egiptu in its Latin adaptation by Tomasz Treter, published in 1601, as well as the translations of this ‘traveller book’ into many European languages (including, as mentioned before, Polish) became immensely popular throughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, and although there were quite a few other Polish pilgrim/​travellers to the Orient, and the Holy Land in particular, most of them did not edit and publish the diaries they had kept during their peregrinations. As Jan Bystroń, in his book about the history of Polish pilgrims and pilgrimages to the Holy Land, observed: Radziwiłł’s peregrination, which helped so much to enlarge knowledge about the Holy Land and Egypt […] had a negative effect on the development of Polish travel writing. This book, published so many times and praised so unanimously, must have discouraged quite a few pilgrims from challenging such an exquisite author […]47 It should be added that Radziwiłł’s Podróż do Ziemi Świętej, Syrii i Egiptu continued to be influential in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Maurycy Mann travelled in ‘the footsteps’ of Mikołaj Radziwiłł and recorded his 46 Burkot, Polskie podróżopisarstwo romantyczne, 44. “[…]duchową, a także gospodarczą izolację”. 47 Jan Stanisław Bystroń, Polacy w Ziemi Świętej, Egipcie i Syrii, 1174–​1914. Kraków: Księgarnia Geograficzna „Orbis”, 1930, p. 40. “Peregrynacja Radziwiłła, która przyczyniła się ogromnie do rozszerzenia wiadomości o Ziemi Świętej i Egipcie […] wpłynęła niekorzystnie na rozwój polskiego piśmiennictwa podróżniczego. Książka ta, w tylu wydaniach znana i tak powszechnie wychwalana odebrała z pewnością niejednemu pielgrzymowi ochotę do konkurowania z tak wybitnym autorem […]” As mentioned in the first chapter of this study, Radziwiłł’s Podróż do Ziemi Świętej, Syrii i Egiptu was published in the original version of the author only at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the book to which Bystroń refers as “Radziwiłł’s Peregrinations” was adopted and translated into Latin by Tomasz Tretter. Therefore, the ‘so exquisite an author’ epithet that Bystroń gave to Mikołaj Radziwiłł, should, at least partly, be transferred, onto Tomasz Tretter, a priest who transformed the crude material of Radziwiłł’s diary kept in Polish, into an ‘exquisite’ traveller book, with the consciously selected epistolary format and rendered in Latin.

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experiences in the three volumes of Podróż na Wschód (A Journey to the East) (1854–​1855). Radziwiłł’s book is also an important intertext in the intriguing, post-​modernist novel by Tomasz Mirkowicz: Pielgrzymka do Ziemi Świętej Egiptu (A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land of Egypt) (1999). So dominant and unique was the position of Radziwiłł’s ‘traveller book’ that another aristocrat, and traveller writer, Aleksander Sapieha, in a book which was first written in French, and then translated (by the author) into Polish, explained to his readers in the Preface to Podróże w słowiańskich krajach odbyte w latach 1802–​1803 [Peregrinations in Slavonic Countries Undertaken in the Years 1802–​1803]: I first wrote this podróż in French, but then I realized that it should be of more relevance to our nation, and therefore I decided to publish it again in the mother tongue. I cherished my desire to serve my countrymen with the second only original Polish podróż, because I  do not know if after the podróż of Prince Radziwiłł ‘the Little Orphan’ any other book [of this kind] has been written.48 Stanisław Burkot challenged this claim of Sapieha and accused him of “lack of knowledge, and aristocratic dilettantism”,49 and insisted that, after all, there had been a few other Polish podróże in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet, Burkot himself admitted that it was not till towards the end of the eighteenth century that two important Polish podróże were written. One was written by Jan Potocki in French, Voyage en Turquie et an Egypte fait en l’année 1784. It was published in Warsaw in 1788, quickly translated into Polish by a friend of Potocki (and a great Polish late Enlightenment man-​of-​letters), Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, and published in 1789 as Podróże do Turek i Egiptu (Travels to Turkey and Egypt). The other one was Józef Drohojewski’s Pielgrzymka do Ziemi Świętej, Egiptu, niektórych wschodnich i południowych krajów odbyta w latach 1788, 1789, 1790, 1791 … (A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Egypt and Some Other Eastern and Southern Countries Undertaken in the Years 1788–​1791),

48

Aleksander Sapieha, Podróże w słowiańskich krajach odbyte w latach 1802–​1803, Wrocław: Wrocław, 1811, 13. “Tę podróż napisałem był wprzody po Francusku, sądząc jednak, że ta więcey dotknąć potrafi nasz naród, umyśliłem ją na nowo w oyczystym wydadź języku. A lubo dogodziłem tu chęci, którą miałem przysłużenia się moim ziomkom, drugą dopiero oryginalną podróż Polską, gdyż nie wiem czy po podróżach Xięcia Radziwiłła Sierotki, jaka inna się znajdnie […]”. 49 Burkot, Polskie podróżopisarstwo romantyczne, 20. “[…]wynika z niewiedzy i arystokratycznego dyletanctwa”.

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which was published posthumously in Cracow in 1812, two decades after the author’s editing of his travel narrative. Burkot perceptively analyses these two books to illustrate the change from the Enlightenment to the Romantic paradigm in Polish travel writing at the turn of the nineteenth century. Burkot sees Drohojewski’s Pielgrzymka do Ziemi Świętej (even though it is chronologically later) as the epitome of the Enlightenment model of travel writing, while Potocki’s Podróże do Turek i Egiptu is rendered as a forerunner of Romantic travel writing.50 Therefore, Drohojewski’s narrative persona is rendered as a traveller-​witness, whose experience and senses are to testify or verify the knowledge of earlier travellers. Burkot points out that such an attitude in the case of Drohojewski’s podróż results in a narrative which gives a strange mixture of “the truth and second-​hand invented stories, which we can find in Marco Polo’s Travels”.51 The most striking Enlightenment feature of Drohojewski’s narrative persona is his reticent nature. We learn very little about the traveller himself, or his emotions and impressions. The low profile constructed for Drohojewski’s narrative persona stands in clear contrast with the centrality of the narrative persona’s position in Potocki’s Voyage en Turquie et an Egypte. Whereas Drohojewski’s attitude may be seen as the ‘swan song’ of the Enlightenment approach to travel writing, Potocki’s book has been seen as the forerunner of the new, Romantic paradigm.52 Jan Potocki (1761–​1815) (known in French literary tradition as Jean Potocki) was a Polish aristocrat who received a classical education in Genève and Lausanne, and a military one in Vienna; later he was a captain in the Polish army. Potocki was not only a traveller, but a linguist, an archaeologist and a historian. After Voyage en Turquie et an Egypte he wrote a few more travel books, such as Voyage dans l’Empire de Maroc (1792) and Voyage dans les steppes d’Astrakhan et du Caucase (1829). His literary reputation is worldwide and rests almost exclusively on one novel, Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse [The Manuscript Found in Saragossa], only fragments of which were published during Potocki’s lifetime. Jan Potocki, as well as Aleksander Sapieha, may serve to illustrate the cultural shift which had taken place in Poland in particular (and central Europe, in general) in the eighteenth century. From the perspective of the aristocratic and educational elites, the Neo-​Latin culture and the Neo-​Latin lingua franca (so dominant in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) were replaced by the French culture and language. Significantly, it was the French literary tradition 50 51

Ibid., 45–​53. Ibid., 51. “ […]przedziwną mieszaniną prawdy i zmyślonych opowieści z drugiej ręki, które odnajdujemy w Opisie świata Marco Polo […”. 52 Ibid., 46.

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that Potocki was immersed in while writing his innovative travel account. Ruth Rosenberg observed that although “[e]‌ighteenth-​century France had produced fewer travelogues than England”, French traveller writers had quite a variety of ways of rendering their voyages into books: French travel writing of the period conformed to few generic restraints, and it ranged from the “pleasurable instruction” of the mid-​century voyages pittoresques to the later sentimentalism of Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du promenur solitaire. Scientists and naturalists mapped territories with new classificatory tools, while popular satirical and fictional travelogues, such as Voltaire’s Candide and Montesquieu’s Letters persanes, turned the observer’s eye back on Europe.53 Potocki was well versed in the French literary and he also must have been aware of the “few generic constraints” imposed on travel writing, so felt free to introduce his own novelties (as he also did with The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, taking to the extreme the convention of framed stories). The formal structure which he decided to use for Voyage en Turquie et an Egypte was that of a collection of personal (travel) letters. It was not new; it had already been applied in French travel writing, as well as, as shown earlier in this chapter, quite profusely and effectively in British travel books, from Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden. Also, Tomasz Treter had decided to use letters when he was adapting Mikołaj Radziwiłł’s travel memoirs into a Neo-​Latin version at the turn of the seventeenth century. However, Potocki’s choice of addressee of his letters, just one addressee, his own mother, allowed him to turn to a more confessional, self-​analysing mode. Another aspect of Potocki’s podróż that locates it within the ideology that might be referred to as ‘pre-​Romantic’ is the challenge the book poses to the Eurocentric, imperialist worldview of early Enlightenment discourse. As Burkot observed: Eurocentrism, which was after all the ideological tool used by the colonial powers to strengthen their supremacy, is questioned; but it is questioned in a ‘European’ manner. The myth (fallacy) of the ‘happy East’ had to be created, ‘happy’ because it lived according to the rules of Nature.54 53 Ruth E. Rosenberg, Music, Travel and Imperial Encounter in 19th-​Century France, 2015, 4. 54 Ibid., 47. “Europocentryzm, który był przecież ideologiczną wykładnią przewagi utrwalających swe panowanie państw kolonialnych, zostaje zakwestionowany, jednakże zakwestionowany po europejsku. Trzeba było stworzyć mit ‘szczęśliwego Wschodu’, szczęśliwego bo żyjącego blisko z naturą”.

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Burkot reads passages from Voyage en Turquie et an Egypte describing the Turks in Istanbul as sweet, quiet, animal-​loving people living close to Nature, in such a manner as to make it clear that he believes that this basically false view of Turks is the result of Potocki’s being influenced by Jean-​Jacque Rousseau’s conviction of the crisis of European civilization and the necessity of man’s return to Nature; “of something that might be called progress through reduction”.55 Apart from Potocki’s foregrounding of his own persona’s psyche, and his launching a form of critique of European civilization, there is one more aspect of Voyage en Turquie et an Egypte which makes this book innovative: the letters to the narrative persona are interspersed with Oriental tales, both seemingly realistic and rampantly fictional and fantastic, tales which Potocki admitted to have been fascinated by, and which, according to him, showed the true nature of the land and its people. Burkot is convinced that Potocki’s decision to add these Oriental tales to the structure of the book was executed in order to “give the genre the aura of a work of art”.56 This explanation is plausible and in line with the statement of Henry Fielding, made in the preface of A Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon thirty five years earlier and referred to earlier in this chapter, as one of the ground-​breaking moves in the genre’s construction, giving himself licencia poetica to add “ornaments of stile and diction” to his non-​fiction referential narrative, thus pushing his own book (and the burgeoning genre) in the direction of ‘literature’. Jan Potocki’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s travel accounts, apart from some obvious differences—​in the gender of their authors, in the ‘exoticism’ of their destinations—​share some important similarities. Formally, both these books rely on the convention of a collection of personal letters: exploiting this convention for the author’s artistic ends. But, perhaps more importantly, both books are much more than descriptions of travel. They are strong ideological statements, critiques of European civilization (albeit from very different perspectives), using the tools constructed on the one hand by Enlightenment philosophers and, on the other, by sentimental writers, in order to create a new paradigm that would soon be later described as ‘Romantic’. At the same time, these two books, because they show narrative personae powered by (pre)Romantic fervour—​though at the same time thoroughly educated during, and influenced by, ‘the Age of Reason’—​serve very well to illustrate the important point Carl Thompson made in his Travel Writing about the nature of the binary opposition of Enlightenment versus Romantic that some

55 56

Ibid., “[…] o czymś, co by można nazwać rozwojem przez redukcję”. Ibid., 46. “[…] co miało uprawianemu gatunkowi nadać charakter dzieła sztuku”.

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travel writing scholars have been constructing in order to explain the dynamics of the genre’s development: Yet the binary opposition […] between ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Romantic’ styles and sensibilities is perhaps too simplistic. […] Many travel writers from the late eighteenth century onwards avail themselves of the new licence to admit personal thoughts and feelings into their accounts, but they do not all depict themselves as significantly changed by these experiences. Nor, in many cases, do they entirely relinquish travel writing’s traditional function of providing important, empirically acquired information about the wider world. Conversely, one also finds from the eighteenth century onwards many explorers who adopt a more personal, subjectivist style, even as they remain principally committed to the Enlightenment project of data collection and empirical enquiry: conspicuous examples include Mungo Park, George Foster, David Livingstone, H.M. Stanley and Richard Burton. Thus a great many travel accounts, from the late eighteenth century down to the present day, actually sit somewhere between the two extremes conventionally denoted by the terms ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Romantic’.57 The first scholar who observed this ‘epistemological shift’ in travel writing which began in the eighteenth century was Charles L. Batten, JR. in his Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-​Century Travel Literature (1967). In his book Batten used the dichotomy constructed by Horace between pleasure and instruction to present the change of the balance between “the two extremes”, what later scholars were to call ‘Enlightenment versus Romantic’ or ‘scientific versus sentimental. Batten analysed the shift from ‘instruction’ to ‘pleasure’ that took place in the course of the eighteenth century in British travel writing, but he also argued that elements of both concepts remained valid in travel narratives till the end of the eighteenth century, even though they were leaning more and more towards ‘pleasure’. It is difficult not to agree with this. However, in his conclusion Batten claimed that: modern travels differ markedly from their eighteenth-​century ancestors: they tend to be much more autobiographical, and they frequently aim primarily at entertainment. Thus, a travel account like Travels with 57 Thompson, Travel Writing, 118.

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Charley is so heavily autobiographical that eighteenth-​century reviewers would surely have branded John Steinbeck an “egotist”.58 Travels with Charley is a 1962 travel book in which Steinbeck described his 1960 long road trip around America in his specially made camper called Rosinante during which he was accompanied by a dog named Charley. The crucial point from the perspective of the present study is not that Steinbeck’s narrator would have not been called “egotist” by eighteenth-​century reviewers, because this seems quite likely, but that it was not in the twentieth century that travel books started to be “much more autobiographical” and started to “aim primarily at entertainment”. That process should be located in the second half of the eighteenth century. Therefore, there is not much difference in overall strategy employed by Steinbeck, a twentieth century celebrity novelist, from the overall strategy employed by such eighteenth-​century British celebrity novelists as Fielding or Smollett in their travel writing. Nigel Leask in “Eighteenth-​Century Travel Writing” (2019) suggested that “the rich variety of eighteenth-​century British travel writing can be generalised as falling into three dominant categories”:59 ‘Grand Tour’, ‘Home Tour’ and “exotic sea voyages and explorations”. According to Leask:60 Each of these three modes of travel and travel writing generated a distinctive set of readerly expectations and rhetorical norms in their representations of foreign places and people, but certain paradigms, which underwent parallel forms of transition, can be observed binding them together.61 This is a very useful taxonomy and statement from the perspective of this book, for it allows to see the development of ‘narrator focused’ travels books, from Fielding to Steinbeck and well beyond, as on the one hand intricately connected with other modes of travel writing from the eighteenth century till today, and on the other unique. If we place over Nigel Leask’s three modes of

58 59

60 61

Charles L. Batten, JR., Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-​Century Travel Literature, Berkeley, 1977, 117. Nigel Leask, “Eighteenth-​Century Travel Writing”, in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs, Cambridge, 2019, 94. Nigel Leask’s tripartite taxonomy is also applied in his recent Stepping Westward:  Writing the Highland Tour c. 1720–​1830, Oxford, 2020, 8–​10. Leask, “Eighteenth-​Century Travel Writing”, 95. Leask, “Eighteenth-​Century Travel Writing”, 96.

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travel writing the ‘scientfic/​sentimental’ grid proposed by Mary Louise Pratt (or Romantic/​Enlightment, subject/​object oriented versions of it), bearing in mind all the time that this is by no means a binary opposition and that both ‘scientific’ and ‘sentimental’ features can be found in (probably) all travel narratives, albeit in very different proportions, we can venture one more generalization: that in the eighteenth (and in the nineteenth) century both ‘Home Tour’ and ‘Grand Tour’ books tended to be more ‘sentimental’, whereas travel books from ‘exotic sea voyages and explorations’ were, on the whole, more ‘scientific’. As we are going to see in the next chapter ‘scientifically’ oriented travel books (usually reporting explorations to the last remaining previously unexplored parts of the world) continued to be written throughout the long nineteenth century but despite all the efforts of such great scholars as Alexander von Humboldt, the process of institutionalizing such discourses as sociological, geological or geographical, as well as the lack of new continents to explore rendered them rarer and rarer. At the same time, those travel books that were bent on describing short trips ‘on the beaten track’, which were focused on the originality (or fame) of a narrative personae on the one hand and smooth literary language on the other, became more and more dominant. The situation of the Polish genre of the podróż at the end of the eighteenth century was markedly different from the Anglophone travel book. For it was not till the fourth decade of the nineteenth century when Józef Ignacy Kraszewski was to realize how central the idiosyncratic (celebrity) persona of a non-​ fictional travel account could and should be. At the end of the eighteenth century, when the genre of the podróż was being forged for the Polish literary tradition in such texts as Niemcewicz’s translation into Polish of Jan Potocki’s account of his travels to Egypt originally written in French, the celebrity culture was non-​existent. And as Joanna Dybiec observed both French editions of Potocki’s book were published anonymously, also the Polish translation revealed neither the author’s nor the translator’s names (however Potocki’s name appeared in one of the footnotes).62 Potocki’s podróż was poised quite evenly between ‘instruction’ and ‘pleasure’ because, on the one hand it provided a wealth of linguistic, geographical, social and historical information on Turkey and Egypt, while on the other it used the format of twenty private letters addressed to his mother, interspersed with five Oriental-​style parables. Had there been an English edition of Potocki’s book, its reviewers probably would not have accused him of “egotism”. 62

Joanna Dybiec, “Paratextual Conditions of Travel Texts: The Case of Jan Potocki’s Voyage en Turquie et an Ègypte (1789)”, Intralinea Online Translation Journal, 2013, 4, last accessed 05.12.2019.

­c hapter 4

Travel Books and Podróże in the Nineteenth Century 1

British Romantic Travel Writing

Many scholars place European literary Romanticism between the end of the eighteenth century and the year 1848 (the year of European revolutions); in the case of British literature the period is usually marked as 1798–​1824, between the publication of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and the death of Lord Byron, the third ‘Second Generation’ Romantic poet. Within the context of Polish literature Romanticism is usually described as the period 1822–​1863, between the publication of Ballady i romanse by Adam Mickiewicz and the outbreak of the January Uprising. One more terminological and chronological point should also be borne in mind while moving into the Romantic period: that the very label ‘Romanticism’ to describe the period was only introduced in English in the second half of the 1820s,1 the time when all three great British Romantic poets of the second generation—​Keats, Byron and Shelley—​were all dead, and when the first generation Romantics—​Wordsworth and Coleridge—​were long past their literary prime. I decided to quote widely from Thompson’s Travel Writing in the closing paragraphs of the preceding chapter, because of this passage’s threefold usefulness from the perspective of the narrative I am constructing in this book. Firstly, it shows the complexity of the shift from the ‘Enlightenment’ to ‘Romantic’ paradigms in travel writing, and the ‘virtual’ nature of the binary opposition ‘Enlightenment’ versus ‘Romantic’. Secondly, it serves very well as a summary of European travel writing (or at least the British, Polish and French versions of it) at the end of the eighteenth century. And thirdly, because it serves equally well as an introduction to European travel writing from the Romantic period onwards. While writing about European travel writing in the period of Romanticism, Stanisław Burkot stressed its importance as a cultural and a literary phenomenon:

1 Rupert, Christiansen, Romantic Affinities: Portraits From an Age, 1780–​1830, London, 1988, 242.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004429611_006

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Travel writing deeply affected the common consciousness in all European countries and […] exerted its influence on literature and art. Stronger than the learned discussions of theoreticians, travel writing undermined the conviction about the unchangeable nature of the canons of beauty and their eternal identity.2 Whereas Amanda Gilroy testified that: travel writing in the Romantic period emerges as perhaps the most capacious cultural holdall, a hybrid discourse that traversed the disciplinary boundaries of politics, letter-​writing, education, medicine, aesthetics, and economics.3 It is during the first three decades of the nineteenth century (the realm of Romanticism in Europe) that travel writing in such countries as France, Germany and Poland was quickly catching up in popularity with travel writing in Britain. As Ruth Rosenberg assessed, after a ‘slow start’ in the eighteenth century: the French threw themselves into travel and travel literature in the nineteenth century. Most of the leading French novelists of the day tried their hand at travelogue, (thus outpacing writers from England and Germany in the genre). The most widely read of these were the novelistic, literary accounts written by restless spirits like François-​Rene de Chateaubriand, Germaine de Staël, Gérard de Nerval, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal and Prosper Merimeé […] They produced travel accounts (as well as travel novels inspired by impressions from abroad) that were rhapsodic and confessional, and which borrowed techniques from the novel, incorporating anecdotes, letters and dialogues.4 Also in Germany, thanks to the travel narratives of such grand Romantic poets as Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Italianische Reise (The Italian Journey) (1816–​1817)

2 Burkot, Polskie podróżopisarstwo romantyczne, 27. “Podróżopisarstwo przeorało głęboko świadomość zbiorową we wszystkich krajach europejskich […] wycisnęło swoje piętno na literaturze i sztuce. Silniej niż uczone spory teoretyków i krytyków sztuki z okresu walki pomiędzy klasykami i romantykami podważyło stare przeświadczenie o niezmienności wzorów piękna i ich odwiecznej tożsamości”. 3 Amanda Gilroy, “Introduction”, in: Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775–​1844, ed. Amanda Gilroy, Manchester, 2000, p. 1. 4 Rosenberg, Music, Travel, p. 4.

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and Heinrich Heine’s Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey) (1826), travel writing gained respect and popularity. As we shall see later in this chapter, the Romantic period in the Polish literary tradition turned out to be for the genre of podróż something of a ‘golden age’, which quickly and a bit surprisingly became its ‘swan song’ as well, as the podróż was to be replaced by shorter, journalistic genres, a phenomenon which Polish literary tradition shares with the Italian and Hispanic ones, but which did not occur in Britain, France or Germany, where the literary markets were strong enough for book length non-​fictional travel genres to prosper. But, whereas in the case of French, German or Polish travel writing, the onset of Romanticism meant the quick flowering of first person travel narratives focused on the individual, unique self of the author (narrative persona), from the British perspective it was more like a continuation of trends that started half a century earlier with professional writers like Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne, and with their decisions to capitalize on their journeys to warmer Mediterranean climates. The travel book as a genre in this period continued and developed new varieties. Travel books were written by men and women alike, they displayed varying degrees of balance between ‘sentimental’ and ‘scientific’, and the three dominant categories postulated for eighteenth-​century travel writing by Nigel Leask—​exotic sea voyages and explorations, Grand Tours and Home Tours—​remained alive and valid for the Romantic period. As far as travel books with a ‘sentimental’ orientation are concerned, the ones written by Mary Shelley, Frances Trollope, Mungo Park and William Beckford were of particular importance. However, it should be borne in mind that alongside them there were written more ‘scientific’ travel books, like the ones to ‘antique lands’ described in Nigel Leask’s Curiosity and Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–​1840. Mary and Percy Shelley’s 1814 tour through to Switzerland, the Alps with its mountains and lakes, brought a book much less canonical than Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818). Mary Shelley followed in the travel book writing footsteps of her mother and wrote History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland with letters descriptive of a sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the glaciers of Chamouni (1817). The letters (two of them) mentioned in the title were written by Mary’s husband, Percy, whose poem entitled “Mont Blanc” was also included. In the Preface Mary Shelley advertised them in a way stressing their ‘immediacy’ and power of emotions: The poem entitled “Mont Blanc” is written by the author of two letters from Chamouni and Vevai. It was composed under the immediate

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impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe: and as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untameable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang.5 It is in the beginning of the Preface that Mary explicitly reveals the dilemma of a tourist travelling to places already visited and written about, and finds two points that ensure that hers would be a new perspective. The first one is the young age of the travellers, which makes “the account of some desultory visits by a party of young people” (herself, her sister and her husband)6 unique and fresh; the other is the fact that the scenes she visited are beautiful in themselves, but what really matters is the other type of freshness: “the great Poet has clothed them with the freshness of a diviner nature”;7 this is a tribute she pays to the talent of her husband, and an ‘advertisement’ for her own book. Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) might be considered unique from the perspective of the travel book genre, in the sense that it did not—​as was the case with many professional novelists from Henry Fielding to V.S. Naipaul—​solidify her status as a literary celebrity, but it actually made her a literary celebrity. Domestic Manners of the Americans was Frances Trollope’s debut, which turned out to be so popular that it helped to launch her into a career as a successful popular novelist; her first novel, and second book altogether, The Refugee in America, was published in the same year and ‘exploited’ similar sentiments as Domestic Manners. Trollope’s travel book, as its title suggests, offered a more ‘sociological’ than ‘picturesque’ description of her travel in America; she depicted her prolonged stay in the (then) frontier city of Cincinnati, when she tried to support her family by running a business there. She set up an extravagant bazaar selling fancy English things, but the whole venture ended in bankruptcy. She was much more successful with her travel writing; Trollope’s witty, dry and caustic criticisms of the American way of life with its tobacco chewing and spitting, horrible table manners, slavery and fervent evangelicalism turned out to be exactly the kind of discourse the British reading public was keen to cherish. “I do not like them. I do not like their principles; I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions”,8 she 5 Mary Shelley, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland with letters descriptive of a sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the glaciers of Chamouni. London, T., jun., 1817, vi. 6 Ibid., iii. 7 Ibid., 5. 8 Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans. London, 1832, 321.

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openly declared. Such a representation of Americans played into the traditional anti-​American sentiment of the British middle-​class, but the book was also popular in America, because, rather than in spite of the fact that, it enraged middle-​class Americans as unfair.9 Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior District of Africa (1799) is now seen as the seminal text in which the imperial discourse of exploration is craftily mingled with the narrative persona constructed in a ‘sentimental’ manner.10 Travels in the Interior District of Africa “continued to be read as the model narrative of a hero explorer” throughout the nineteenth century (the book had eleven editions in the nineteenth century on top of three editions in 1799 and 1800).11 William Beckford’s Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents in a Series of Letters from Various Parts of Europe had two different editions, the first one in 1783, the second one in 1834, i.e roughly at the beginning and the end of the Romantic period as we conceive of it; from Beckford’s perspective they were published at two opposite poles of his life—​he was twenty-​three and seventy-​ four, respectively. The first version was suppressed by the author under pressure from an aristocratic family and burnt shortly before publication. Beckford saved a few copies which he kept at home in Fonthill “to display to friends and interested visitors”.12 Robert Gemmett offered several key reasons, of a privately erotic, literary and political nature, for the suppression and burning of the 1783 edition of Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents; he claimed that Beckford’s family feared that William’s “lively imagination and quickness of sensibility […] so opposite to common modes of thinking […] might prejudice him in the House of Commons, and make ministers imagine he was not capable of solid business”. Besides, “beneath all its veneer of fine language, there was a moral rottenness that presumably would lend cadence to the ugly rumours that were circulating about Beckford’s questionable [homoerotic] relationship with William Courteney”. Moreover, “once the book was distributed, the severe criticisms of the Dutch that filled its early pages would offend many prominent 9

10 11 12

Jean Farawell, in an essay entitled “Mrs. Trollope’s Vituperative View of Americans”, argued that Domestic Manners of Americans was influenced by Captain Basil Hall’s Travels in North America (1829), “[t]‌he book was so hostile that it was said that the British government had commissioned Hall to write it in order to stop the growing admiration of the British people for the American way of life”. http://​www.victorianweb.org/​authors/​ francestrollope/​farewell1.html., last accessed 05.03.2019. See, e.g. Białas The Body Wall: Somatics of Travelling and Discursive Practices, 2006, 59–​88. Marsters, “Introduction”, in Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, ed. Kate Ferguson Marsters, Durham and London, 2000, 2. Robert J.  Gemmett, “Introduction” in Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, Stroud. 2006, 24.

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political figures, particularly at a time when the English government was attempting to maintain good relations with that country”.13 The differences between the narrative persona of the 1783 and 1834 versions seem to be indicative of the general trend towards the dominance of middle class masculinity at the turn of the nineteenth century and the ways in which they affected travel writing. Beckford’s 1783 narrative persona was blatantly extravagant and “self-​ consciously, almost defiantly aristocratic”.14 In the 1834 version: Beckford cut away the personal allusions and the anecdotes that might in any way make the persistent rumours about his homosexual nature more credible; he slashed passages brimming with sentimentality, he eliminated the dream machinery along with the excessive flights of imagination; the art criticism, which bulked large in the book, he qualified and made less rhapsodic. In short, he gave the book a general toning down in an obvious effort to avoid extravagance of any kind.15 Although, unlike the great German Romantic poets Goethe and Heine, the English Romantic poets never wrote any travel books sensu per se, Lord Gordon Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–​1818) and William Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (1810–​1835) are both important examples of travel writing that influenced the ways in which travel book writers in the following generations constructed their narrative personae. The first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage are loosely based on the ‘unorthodox’ Grand Tour Byron undertook in the years 1809–​1811. Cantos iii and iv were based on Byron’s European travels in the years 1813–​1817. It was ‘unorthodox’ because, unlike the ‘classical’ Grand Tour, Byron’s (as well as other Grand Tourists’ of this period) itinerary excluded France (as well as the Netherlands and Germany), which had been pivotal for the tour since its (informal) establishment at the end of the eighteenth century. Byron’s route led through Portugal, Spain, Malta, Albania and Greece. However, it is not only the itinerary of Byron’s Grand Tour that might be labelled ‘unorthodox’; but also the text that was the tour’s result. Formally, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a hybrid. Its structure is built around a long digressive poem Byron himself called “A Romaunt”; “Byron’s apology for his choice of metre referred the reader back to the authority of the romance writers Ariosto, Spenser, Thomson and Beattie,

13 Ibid., 21. 14 Turner, British Travel Writers, 47. 15 Gemmett, “Introduction”, 15.

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who had adopted the Spenserian stanza”.16 But the aura of romance and medieval ‘pilgrimage’ undertaken by a ‘childe’, a youth aspiring to be a knight, is checked by Byron’s own Preface and prose notes he supplied for the poem, which “employed the conventional register of travel writing”.17 Byron’s hybrid travel writing narrative was written outside the perimeter of the travel book but it contained numerous satirical and critical asides to this mode of writing, with its conventions and fashions. In this aspect Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is, in many ways, like Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (another ‘non-​travel book’ crucial in the development of the travel book genre), with which it also shares an important feature of the way in which “the subjective, whimsical digression interrupts and diverts the linear purpose of a pilgrimage”.18 Byron’s famous histrionic gesture of disentangling his hero from the crowd of (mostly British) tourists was crucial for the whole of British travel writing, particularly after the advent of mass tourism and mass tourists in the wake of Thomas Cook’s 1841 epic invention of the package tour. […]in the crowd They could not deem me one of such; I stood among them, but not of them; in a shroud Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.19 As James Buzard argued, “in spite of his vilification as the embodiment of Continental libertarianism and libertinage”, and in spite of conservative writers and thinkers such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Carlyle, or Alfred Tennyson, Byron managed to become “one of ‘the public gods’ of Victorian England” and was “regularly sought as a guiding spirit for the nineteenth-​century tour”.20 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage also had a profound effect on a whole range of texts which can be located within the borders of non-​fiction travel writing. On the one hand, there appeared quite a few texts designed for ‘literary tourists’ who were planning to tour Europe in Byron’s footsteps. For example, Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse wrote Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold, Containing Dissertations on the Ruins of Rome and an Essay on

16

Jane Stabler, “Byron’s Digressive Journey”, in Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775–​1844, ed. Amanda Gilroy, Manchester, 2000, 224. 17 Stabler, “Byron’s Digressive Journey”, 224. 18 Ibid., 226. 19 Lord Gordon Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, in The Works of Lord Byron: Including the Supressed Poems, Paris, 1828, 67. 20 Buzard, The Beaten Track, 30.

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Italian Literature (1818), whereas John Murray, who was Byron’s publisher, entered the guide-​book business and published a pocket edition of Lord Byron’s Poetry, “so as to enable Travellers to carry it with their other HANDBOOKS”.21 The growing popularity of John Murray’s handbooks (a term used in that period for what we now know as ‘guide-​books’) throughout the nineteenth century resulted in the situation when their “ ‘atmospheric’ Byron became the version of the poet most widely disseminated. This Byron soon seemed to be popping up everywhere on the tourist’s map of Europe”.22 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage “also gave rise to new varieties of travellers’ texts, which in time supplanted the prevailingly classicist volumes of the Grand Tour. One form probably unimaginable without Byron is the nineteenth-​century poetic travel book”.23 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and William Beckford’s Dreams and Waking Thoughts (despite his ‘tempering’ of the 1834 version) might be seen as radically new representations of the Grand Tour, written in contrast to the ‘classicist’ and ‘classical’ vein in which the Tour had traditionally been rendered, providing inspiration for travel writers of all walks of life throughout the Victorian period and beyond. William Wordsworth’s influence, on the other hand, was felt most intensively within the ‘social project’ called‘the Home Tour’; a project in full bloom at the turn of the nineteenth century as a result of the growth of sentimentalism, ‘picturesque tourism’, and the inaccessibility of continental Europe for Grand Tourists (Byron was one of the few who ventured on a difficult alternative, via Portugal and Gibraltar). The Lake District had been from the beginning of the Home Tour the prime target of the Home Tourists, and Wordsworth was by far the most ‘lake’ of the two ‘lake poets’. He was born in Cockermouth in the Lake District, was educated there, and after a few years in Cambridge, France and Germany, he returned to his beloved Lake District to live there for the remaining fifty-​one years of his life (from 1799 till 1850). The first edition of The Guide to the Lakes was published in 1810, the fifth in 1835; it remains a testimony to the fact that the travel book was not the only genre within the wider category of travel writing in the nineteenth century which was popular with readers and enabled established celebrity writers to improve their financial situation. Moreover, as Stephen Gill, Wordsworth’s biographer, stated in the Preface to a recent edition of The Guide to the Lakes, the book possesses distinct literary qualities: 21

John Murray, Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, n.p., Quoted in James Buzard, “The Uses of Romanticism: Byron and the Victorian Continental Tour”, Victorian Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Autumn, 1991), 37. 22 Buzard, “The Uses of Romanticism”, 44. 23 Ibid., 36.

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The Guide is multi-​faceted. It is a guide, but it is also a prose-​poem about light, shapes, and textures, about movement and stillness […] It is a paean to a way of life, but also a lament for the inevitability of its passing […] What holds this diversity together is the voice of complete authority, compounded from experience, intense observation, thought, and love.24 In other terms, Wordsworth was doing with his guide a similar thing that British travel writers had been doing with travel books at least since Henry Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. He was ‘embellishing it with ornaments of stile and diction’, to borrow Fielding’s phrase. In the Polish literary tradition, during the Romantic period podróż gained in popularity with writers, although, mostly because of the absence of a sizable literary market, many of the texts, even of well-​known writers, remained in manuscript form. Apart from the traditional destinations—​like the Orient—​ described by travel writers, there appeared new ones, like Northern and Western Europe (particularly Britain), South and North America, Siberia, and Polish versions of ‘the Home Tour’. 2

Polish Romantic Travel Writing

The Orient, and particularly the Holy Land, had been visited (mostly for religious purposes) and described in different forms of Polish travel narratives at least since the Renaissance. Jan Potocki’s and Jóżef Drohojewski’s books from journeys undertaken to the Orient at the end of the eighteenth century have been discussed in the previous chapter to illustrate the slow shift from the Enlightenment paradigm to the Romantic one. This oriental direction became even more popular with Polish writers in the Romantic period. One of the results of the loss of independence of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century was the turn undertaken by many writers and intellectuals to Christianity (often in radical, Messianic versions) and its sources as a potential force capable of bringing about the liberation of Poland. An inspiration in this area was also provided by two books by François-​René de Chateaubriand: his apology of Christianity, Génie du christianisme [The Genius of Christianity] (1802) and his own famous account of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem [Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem] (1811). The key Polish Romantic

24

Stephen Gill, “Preface” in “Wordsworth’s ‘Guide to the Lakes’ with a new preface by Stephen Gill”. London, 2004, vi-​viii.

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podróże to the Holy Land included: Ignacy Hołowiński’s Pielgrzymka do Ziemi Świętej (A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land) (1853), and Władysław Wężyk’s Podróże pod starożytnym świecie (Travels in the Ancient World) (1842). The great Polish Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki also went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but the journey’s textual result was not a podróż—​that is a non-​fiction, prose narrative—​but a long digressive poem, Podróź do Ziemi Świętej z Neapolu (A Journey to the Holy Land from Naples). Unlike Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which established Byron’s fame (“I woke up one morning and found myself famous” was Byron’s famous reaction to the instant success of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage), Podróż do Ziemi Świętej z Neapolu was never published during the poet’s lifetime.25 Polish Romantic travels into lands which had belonged to Poland before the partitions of the late eighteenth century were motivated only to a certain extent ‘sentimentally’ or ‘picturesquely’, as was usually the case with the British Home Tour narratives. The dominant perspective of Polish travel writers on the Home Tour was ‘patriotic’. The first such travel writer was Klementyna Hoffmanowa, who wrote a series of travel accounts through various areas of former Polish lands, which she later gathered into two volumes of Opisy różnych okolic Królestwa Polskiego (Descriptions of Various Areas of the Kingdom of Poland) (1833). Hoffmanowa—​in a manner similar to quite a few other Romantic ‘home travellers’—​saw her journeys, and their textual representations, as ways of investigating Polish customs and landscapes, and more generally the nature of ‘Polishness’. Klementyna Hoffmanowa was also aware that she was writing not only within the Polish-​patriotic, but more generally within the ‘Romantic’ paradigm, for example in Droga z Warszawy do Puław, in which she described the village of Bochotnica, stressing the view’s “Romantic” nature.26 The Polish perspective is also quite strong in in those podróże of the Romantic period which took travellers abroad, as was the case with Edward Raczyński’s Dziennik podróży do Turcyj odbytey w roku mdcccxiv (A Diary of the Journey to Turkey in the year mdcccxiv). Count Raczyński travelled in 1814 south from Warsaw to Odessa and from there he sailed to Istanbul. He was sightseeing in and around the capital of the Ottoman Empire for some two months, took a caique trip to the islands of Tenedos, Lesbos, and the Turkish coast of Asia Minor, returning to Warsaw via Odessa at the end of November 1814. On his way to Odessa he was travelling mostly through lands which used to belong to 25 26

For a comparison of these two Romantic travel poems see, e.g, Staniszewski:  “ ‘Podróż do Ziemi świętej z Neapolu’ Słowackiego a ‘Wędrówki Childe Harolda” Byrona“. (Model podróży romantycznej)”. Klementyna Hoffmanowa, Opisy różnych okolic Królestwa Polskiego, Wrocław, 1833, 37.

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Poland and he chose to present different episodes—​selected seemingly quite at random—​about Poland’s past glories; thus going by the ruins of the castle of Łuck (Lustsk) in the Wołyń region resulted in a description of the congress there in 1429, in which the Polish king Władysław Jagiełło had debated for thirteen weeks, the Ottoman threat and other key international issues with (the future) Holy Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg with his wife Barbara, tsar Vasily ii of Russia, Boris of Tver, delegates of Emperor John viii Palaiologos, Danish king Eric of Pomerania and many other notables and diplomats. Marek Jakimowski, a Polish knight who had been taken prisoner by the Turks in the battle of Cecora in 1620, was sold into slavery and became leader of a mutiny of galley slaves who managed to take control of their galley and escape from the port of Metelin in Lesbos to Messina in Sicily.27 But the podróż of Raczyński, apart from the Polish patriotic angle, is a truly ‘universal’ travel account. It is much more dominated by the paradigm of the old Enlightenment than the new Romantic one. Raczyński had been home educated and then went on to study languages and natural sciences at the universities of Frankfurt (Oder) and Berlin. His podróż is the result of long research undertaken both before his excursion to Turkey and afterwards: the book was first published in 1821, seven years after his return. This first edition was very ornate and illustrated by the painter Ludwig Fuhrmann, who had accompanied Raczyński on the trip. Almost every page of Dziennik podróży has footnotes, which are often longer than ‘the text proper’. Raczyński read English, French, German, Latin and Greek texts on history, geography, geology and travel; he not only referred to them but often presented contradictory positions of scholars and argued strongly for what he believed to be historical truth. Of the numerous intertexts of the book the most characteristic, crucial and central are: the Illiad (in the Polish translation of Franciszek Dmochowski), Gibbon’s Decline

27

Michael Polczynski, an American historian of Polish origin specializing in Early Modern East European and Ottoman Empire in a paper entitled “A Polish Slave’s Escape from an Ottoman Galley” showed how Jakimowski’s account now “serves as a quintessential example of the anti-​Ottoman literature that circulated throughout Christendom during periods of conflicts with the Padishah”. Polczynski also stated that: “There is some debate as to when these events actually occurred; an account of Jakimowski’s adventure was printed in Rome, perhaps as early as 1623, under the title “La conquista della galera di Alessandria nel porto di Metelline, coll’oepra e gran coraggio del Capitano Marco Jakimowski Polacco”. Five years later, the tale was reprinted in Rome, Florence, and Kraków in Italian, German, and Polish. As no original copy of the 1623 publication has survived, it remains unclear whether the mutiny occurred in the year 1621, 1622, or 1627”. http://​www.docblog.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/​2014/​04/​a-​polish-​slaves-​escape-​from-​ ottoman.html, last accessed 11.12.2019.

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and Fall of the Roman Empire (also in Polish translation) and Lady Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters. Whereas the first chapter, reporting the trip south to Odessa, focuses on the former glories and contrastive contemporary misery of Poland’s former south-​eastern lands and the final, seventh chapter, is a report on the Ottoman’s Empire military and civil administration seen in historical perspective, the ‘core’ of Raczyński’s book, chapters two to six, is the pilgrim’s/​ tourist’s/​scholar’s report from the ‘cradle of Mediterranean civilization’ “where almost each piece of land is made famous with reminiscences of talents, virtue, bravery and spiritual greatness”.28 Raczyński was born in 1886, two years before Lord Byron, and travelled to the Eastern Mediterranean five years after him; Raczyński’s podróż did not make him famous overnight but it shows many similarities (but also quite a few differences) with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Byron’s and Raczyński’s classical education made them cultural pilgrims, bemoaning past splendours and past heroes; they were also both fascinated by various aspects of the culture of the Ottoman Empire they saw unfolding before them. In Byron’s case this fascination could, perhaps, be summarized in the sartorial display of the ‘Albanian costume’ he purchased in 1809 in Janina and which he donned in 1813 to pose for Thomas Phillips. Raczyński, on the other hand, was describing customs, tradition and the way of life of the (affluent) Turks he met in the capital with growing admiration for the integrity of their lives: The Turks live long lives and they remain nimble in their old age, which should be attributed particularly to their abstinence and moderation in food and drink, and even more to this rare equanimity of mind with which they bear the sharpest of life’s adventures and adversities.29 Although fragments of Dziennik podróży do Tatrów (A Diary of a Journey to the Tatra Mountains) by Seweryn Goszczyński had been published in different periodicals in the 1830s and the 1840s, this diary appeared in book form only in 1853, and is regarded as one of the masterpieces of Polish Romantic travel writing, for at least three reasons. Firstly, the diary format, with its fragmentariness,

28 Edward Raczyński, Dziennik podróży do Turcyi odbytey w roku MDCCCXIV, Wrocław: Wilhelm Bogumił Korn, 1823, 214. “[…]gdzie każda niemal piędź ziemi wsławiona jest wspomnieniem talentów, cnoty, odwagi, lub wielkości duszy!” 29 Raczyński, Dziennik podróży, 144. “Turcy przecie długo żyją, i starość czerstwą mają, co szczególniey przypisać należy wstrzemięźliwości ich i umiarkowaniu w iedzeniu i piciu, a bardziey może jeszcze tey rzadkiej umysłu spokoyności, z którą znosić zwykli naydokliwsze życia przygody i nieszczęścia”.

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allowed for the foregrounding of the narrative persona of an artist and a revolutionary in one. Secondly, Goszczyński’s fascination with the local peasants and their folklore has been channelled into a presentation of the beginning of the process of the conversion of the local population into a modern nation. Thirdly, Goszczyński was the first writer in Polish literature to nurture a Romantic fascination with the awesome landscapes of the Alps, and the first to describe the Alpine scenery of the Tatra Mountains in a dynamic, impressionistic way.30 The struggle of Poles to regain Poland’s independence lasted throughout the whole of the nineteenth century; these attempts culminated in Powstanie Listopadowe, the November Uprising of 1830–​1831, and Powstanie Styczniowe, the January Uprising of 1863–​1864. Both these uprisings were brutally crushed by the Russians who, after each of them, retaliated by sentencing thousands of Polish patriots to long periods in Siberia. The reports many of them wrote are formally more like diaries than the podróż. As Burkot contended, the podróż, so characteristic of early Romanticism, started to undergo a process of considerable alterations. It began to be replaced by other forms such as scientific exploration reports, diaries, and early forms of press reportage.31 The most popular and interesting of these was Rufin Piotrowski’s Pamiętniki z pobytu na Syberyi (Diaries from a Stay in Siberia) (1860–​1861), which described not only Piotrowski’s imprisonment in Siberia, but also his sensational, thriller-​like escape from Siberia on foot all the way to freedom in Western Europe. Rufin Józefat Piotrowski (born 1806)  fought in the November Uprising of 1830–​1831. Afterwards he lived as an exile in Paris, was a member of the left-​wing Towarzystwo Demokratyczne Polskie (Polish Democratic Society), and in 1843 volunteered to return in disguise (as a teacher of languages from Malta) to the lands inhabited by Poles under the Tsarist grip in order to organize Polish national conspiracy there. After just a few months in Kamieniec Podolski he was betrayed by fellow Poles, arrested, transported to Kiev, interrogated and tried there. He was sentenced for life to forced labour in Siberia. In the dead of the Siberian winter of 1846 he ran from there, mostly on foot, all the way through Russia to the Prussian border, which he managed to cross near Königsberg. Then he returned to Paris to tell his astounding story to exiled Poles and those of French and British journalists who were ready to listen to him. Between 1848 30 Burkot, Polskie podróżopisarstwo romantyczne, 258–​268. 31 Burkot, Polskie podróżopisarstwo romantyczne, 185. “Podróż jako gatunek piśmiennictwa, tak charakterystyczny dla wczesnej fazy romantyzmu, ulegała znaczącym przekształceniom. Jej miejsce zajmować poczęły inne formy wypowiedzi—​opisy i studia naukowe, pamiętniki, wczesne formy reportażu prasowego […]”.

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and 1850 Piotrowski, a fervent Polish patriot and a devout Roman Catholic, wrote his diaries. These proved to be too long to be publishable and only short fragments of them appeared in Przegląd Poznański (Poznań Review) in 1850.32 After the long process of shortening and polishing, which took a decade, three volumes of Piotrowski’s diaries were published in Poznań in 1860–​1861. But from that moment, the astonishing translation and editing history of Piotrowski’s diaries sped up considerably. The period at the beginning of the 1860s in Warsaw and the western provinces of the Russian empire inhabited by Poles was marked by strikes, demonstrations, and social and national upheaval, to what Tsarist authorities retorted with arrests and reprisals, which, in turn, sparked off the desperate January Uprising of 1863, again brutally crashed by the Russians. Tens of thousands of Poles were, once again, deported to Siberia. Piotrowski’s diaries, with the breath-​taking journey/​escape at their very core, became an important tool in the propaganda war that supporters of the Polish cause were waging in Western Europe. Piotrowski, after his escape not only wrote and edited his diaries, but also actively participated in the struggles against Russia, organizing Polish armed forces in Hungary during the events in 1848 and then in Turkey during the Crimean war. At the beginning of the 1860s he was teaching in a Polish school in Paris. A fellow Pole and a fellow teacher of his, Julian Klaczko, translated and shortened Piotrowski’s diaries into French and the one-​volume version was published in Paris in 1863 under the title Souvenirs d’un Sibérian: extraits des mémoires. Swedish, Danish, Russian, and English translations of Klaczko’s version were all published in 1863 (while the Dutch one appeared in 1864 and the Norwegian one in 1934).33 The English translation of Klaczko’s French abbreviated version of Piotrowski’s diaries was published in 1863 by Longman, Green and Longman in London as The Story of a Siberian Exile by M. Rufin Pietrewski, followed by the narrative of recent events in Poland, translated from French. The anonymous translator’s preface ended with the following declaration: The translator is in no ways responsible for any of the sentiments to be found in this book. His task has been simply that of rendering into English the thoughts and words of other men. In the story of M. Rufin Pietrowski he has felt the disadvantages that attend upon the translation of a translation; but he has striven to preserve the integrity of the narrative, 32 33

Józef Bachórz, “Pamiętnik niezwykłej ucieczki z Syberii”, Rocznik Towarzystwa Literackiego imienia Adama Mickiewicza, 1993, 17. Bachórz, “Pamiętnik niezwykłej ucieczki z Syberii”, 18.

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even in the smallest particulars. It is with a view to this end that he has adopted all those Russian and Polish phrases, idioms, and words which occur in the text of M. Klackso.34 The Longman translation was followed by two long (anonymous) essays, the first of them recounting the history of Poland since the eighteenth century, the second focusing on events in Warsaw in 1861 and 1862. Also in London and also in 1863, a different translation of Piotrowski’s diaries appeared. The publisher was Routledge, Warne and Routledge. The title was different and the title page announced: My Escape from Siberia, by Rufin Piotrowski, translated, with the express sanction of the Author by E. S., With a Portrait and Map. In his (her?) preface, the translator, hiding under the initials E. S. sketched the same political and historical situation and events which had been, in greater detail, depicted and analysed in Longman’s essays following The Story of a Siberian Exile. Both the preface in Routledge’s book and the essays in the Longman one are political paratexts, fervently supporting the Polish fight for independence and exposing the cruelties of Tsarist Russia. E. S.’s version is considerably shorter than Piotrowski’s 1860–​1861 three-​volume diaries in Polish, although it is about twice as long as Klaczko’s French rendering (and the Longman translation). Piotrowski’s diaries in both the Longman and Routledge editions were rendered in the fashion typical of novels published at that time. In both versions the contents of chapters are introduced with ‘leads’, summaries of the contents worded in crisp, journalistic headlines. And in both versions, for all the political means to which Piotrowski’s narrative was used, it is the journey/​escape which is at the centre. In both versions as well it is the narrator’s detachment and distance with which he treats himself as the protagonist of the narrative which is so original. Piotrowski was the second prisoner of who had managed to escape from Siberia. Seventy years before him another Pole, Maurcy Beniowski had done so. But Beniowski had been helped by numerous people while Piotrowski acted absolutely on his own. In fact, Piotrowski confessed that after being betrayed by Poles in Kamieniec Podolski he vowed not to trust anyone: “I determined not to ask for help, protection or advice from any soul until I had passed the limits of the Tzar’s dominions”.35 The narrator in both the Longman and Routledge translations reveals for his readers his way of thinking, his plans, aborted alternative routes, hopes 34 35

Rufin Piotrowski. The Story of a Siberian Exile, London: Longman, Green, Longman, 1863, xii. It should be noted that Piotrowski’s name is misspelt (as “Pietrowski”) both on the title page and in the translator’s preface. “Julian Klaczko” became “M. Klackso”. Rufin Piotrowski, The Story of a Siberian Exile, London, 1863, 122.

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and worries. His is an adventure narrative filled with cliff hanging situations, at the same time displaying lucid, careful thinking and planning. Piotrowski’s ultimate success, escaping “the limits of the Tzar’s dominions”, is shown to be the result of his skills as a linguist and an actor. He speaks various dialects and jargons and changes his disguises when the need arises. So at first he puts on the disguise of “a man of Siberia (sbirski tcheoviek)”,36 but then, when need arises, transforms into various versions of commercial travellers or workmen looking for employment, even into a Christian Orthodox pilgrim (bohomolets) on his way to shrines. At times, the suspense-​filled narration gives way to a guidebook-​like narrative. For example, when the narrator describes the climate of Siberia, or when he declares that although he did not actually get to the monastery of Solovets (which at one stage was his ‘excuse’ destination as a pilgrim), he nevertheless “collected a great number of details about that place of pilgrimage,”37 in the Longman translation, while in the Routledge one he simply declares: “Before, however, continuing my journey, I must give a few words to a description of Archangel and the convent of Soloviek”.38 With Piotrowski’s diaries we get a wealth of interesting comparative material for research into the nature of the editing and translation processes undertaken by authors, translators and editors alike to convert the ‘unpublishable’ volumes of Piotrowski’s 1850 diaries into various, quite different and much shorter versions of those diaries to be published in various European languages more than a decade later to promote the ‘Polish cause’. If we maintain the narrower, generic perspective on Piotrowski’s 1860–​1861 three-​volume edition, we get confirmation of the process revealed by Stanisław Burkot of the genre of the podróż in the late Romantic period being transformed into other generic forms such as diaries or early forms of press reportage.39 3

British and American Travel Books in the Victorian Period

Despite some differences, the ways in which travel writing was developing in English (British) and Polish literary traditions from the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century were, to a large extent, similar. Out of many literary and semi-​literary, fiction and non-​fiction forms, some of which had ancient origins, in the course of the eighteenth century there arose a genre that was 36 Ibid., 121. 37 Ibid., 170. 38 Rufin Piotrowski, My Escape from Siberia, London, 1863, 334. 39 See Burkot, Polskie podróżopisarstwo romantyczne, 185.

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predominantly non-​fiction, referential, and narrated in the first person by a narrator who tended to be the main hero of the narrative; the British literary tradition this genre was later known as the travel book, and its Polish equivalent the podróż. These genres developed steadily throughout the second half of the eighteenth century and the Romantic period; quantitatively this growth was much more impressive in Britain, mostly the result of the country’s wealth, imperial explorations, and the huge literary market with huge literary audience. In the second half of the nineteenth century the travel book continued to develop and flourish in Britain, whereas in Polish writing, the podróż quite quickly disappeared or, to use a different perspective, was quickly replaced by different shorter forms, usually published in newspapers and periodicals. These forms were later, from the position of literary scholars at the end of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-​first perceived as early instances of the reportaż podróżniczy (travel reportage). The reasons for this situation, as well as the main trends in the development of the travel book and the reportaż podróżniczy will be discussed in a later part of this section. The two nineteenth-​century inventions which radically changed the ways in which people travelled and, in consequence, the ways in which people wrote about their travels, originated in Britain, the most advanced industrial power in the world at the time. In 1825, the first railway line, from Stockton to Darlington, was opened. In 1841 Thomas Cook organized the first ‘package tour’, a one day rail excursion at a shilling a head from Leicester to Loughborough in central England; this relatively humble event is now perceived as the starting point of ‘mass tourism’. In his discussion of Anglophone travel writing from this period Tim Youngs remarked that:  “new modes of travel brought about new ways of seeing and writing. These produced a self-​consciousness about tradition and the modern”.40 This statement is equally true in the case of Polish travel writing. One of the results of the ease and popularity of travel brought about by the rapidly expanding networks of railways all over the world and the growth of tourism in Britain and Europe was the distinction made between a ‘tourist’ and a ‘traveller’. James Buzard observed that the word ‘tourist’, which was first used in English in the late eighteenth century as a synonym of ‘traveller’, began to be used pejoratively in the middle of the nineteenth century.41 However, even though mass tourism started to develop only in the second half of the nineteenth century, the attitude that may be called an ‘anti-​tourist’, or an

40 Youngs, The Cambridge Introduction, 62. 41 Buzard, The Beaten Track, 1.

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‘elitist stance’ had been applied in travel writing at least since the middle of the previous century, when Philip Thicknesse was disentangling himself textually from “low-​bred rich people of England”42 in Observations on the Customs and Manners of the French Nation (1766) through his supposedly ‘superior’ motives “[f]‌or my own part I  came to see, not to make a shew”.43 And after Byron’s Childe Harold, British tourists who thought of themselves as ‘travellers’ could keep on repeating, whenever they saw a group of their compatriots in some famous Italian site, that although “they stood among them”, they were not “one of them, in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts”. British and American travel book writers of the Victorian era generally tended to avoid any associations of their carefully constructed narrative personae with the concept of a ‘tourist’, and sometimes, as was the case with Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869), they relied on humorous exploitation of the ‘cultural superiority’ of their personae over the ‘vulgar’ though ‘innocent’ tourists. One more new aspect of Victorian travel books that was the result of the growth of tourism was the clear cut and final separation of the travel book and the guide-​book with the evolution “of […] upper class, ‘comfort and culture’ guides such as Murray and Baedeker” after 1840.44 The key effect of this separation was that Victorian travel books became even more ‘sentimental’ in the sense of the term used by Mary Louise Pratt and Casey Blanton; that is, they were even more structured around the narrative persona and his or her (mis)adventures. On the other hand, it should be remembered that in this period, ‘scientific’ travel books of exploration were still strong, with accounts like Charles Darwin’s Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the various countries visited by H.M.S. Beagle (1839) or Richard Burton’s The Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860). One istempted to disagree with the statement of Ruth Rosenberg that in the nineteenth century French novelists “outpaced” British ones in the number of travel books they wrote.45 The list she provided of six key French novelists of that period who turned to travel books could quickly be overrun by the list of British Victorian novelists who did the same: Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, William Thackeray, Samuel Butler, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, George Eliot and Hilarie Belloc, to name but eight. 42 Thicknesse, Observations on the Customs, 8. 43 Ibid., 9. 44 Giles Barber, “The English-​Language guide book to Europe up to 1870”, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.)., Journeys through the Market: Travel, Travellers and the Book Trade. New Castle, DE.,105. 45 Rosenberg, Music, Travel, 4.

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The British Victorian novelists’ reliance on travel books as vehicles to enhance their celebrity status differed in intensity as well as structure, as well as the degree of relying on novelistic techniques to sustain the narration. Charles Dickens, for example, wrote two travel books: American Notes (1842) and Pictures from Italy (1846). American Notes is the result of the tour of America Dickens took early in 1842, during which he was feted as a great new novelist, the author of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. In American Notes Dickens relied on his skills as a reporter, which he had acquired in his teens when working for London newspapers as a court reporter (1829–​1833). His criticism of various aspects of American life, often conducted in a humorous vein, owes probably as much to his deep concerns as a social reformer as to the popularity in Britain (and America) of Frances Trollope’s predominantly anti-​American travel book, Domestic Manners of Americans, published just six years earlier. Dickens widened the scope of criticism and included themes both grave and merely funny, both public and private: slavery, the commercialization of many aspects of life, extreme individualism, the universal habit of tobacco chewing/​spitting, and last but not least, American copyright laws, which allowed for pirate editions of his novels. When in 1844 Dickens went to Italy with his family, he knew he was a tourist there, following in the footsteps of many generations of Grand Tourists. He adopted a humble profile, and in the preface, entitled “The Reader’s Passport”, he stated that: “[m]‌any books have been written upon Italy affording many means of studying this interesting country”,46 so he did not intend to offer “any grave examination into the government or misgovernment of any portion of the country”,47 and that because there was not a single famous painting or sculpture in all Italy which could not be “buried under a mountain of printed paper devoted to dissertations on it”, he would not “though an earnest admirer of Painting and Sculpture, expatiate at any length on famous Pictures and Statues”.48 In other words, he was not going to compete with guide-​books like John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy (1843). Instead, he advertised his book as “a series of faint reflections—​mere shadows in the water—​of places to which the imaginations of most people are attracted in a greater or less degree, on which mine have dwelt for years, and which have some interest for all”.49 He embellished these “faint 46

Charles Dickens, Complete Works:  American Notes and Pictures from Italy. London, 1970, 309. 47 Ibid., 309. 48 Ibid, 310. 49 Ibid., 310.

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reflections” with the dry humour he so successfully handled in his novels, along with some structural novelistic play; perhaps nowhere more so than in the chapter including “An Italian Dream”, when a visit to Venice is presented as a dream into which the narrative persona falls during a coach journey from Modena to Verona. The name of the magic city—​even though some of its famous sights are mentioned by name: “the Bridge of Sighs”,50 “the Grand Canal […] and the Winged Lion”51 —​is dramatically withheld till the closing sentence of the chapter: “I have, many and many a time, thought since, of this strange Dream under the water: half-​wondering if it lie there yet, and if its name be VENICE”.52 Anthony Trollope, another key Victorian novelist, also capitalized on the popularity of the travel book in the period as well as on his own celebrity status, publishing several accounts of his extensive journeys to such far-​off places as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, North America and Iceland. Trollope’s travel books are crammed with facts, tables and statistics, and there is relatively little foregrounding of his narrative persona in these narratives. Instead, they were—​to a far greater extent than the travel books of any other Victorian novelist—​pieces of what might be called ‘the British Imperial project’. As Buzard perceptively observed of Trollope’s travel books: His question was: are these suitable lands to which to send the United Kingdom’s surplus laboring men? Generally speaking, two of his books say no (The West Indies and the Spanish Main and South Africa), two emphatically yes (South America and Australia and New Zealand). And everywhere Trollope went on the journeys that yielded those books, if he did not always move within the envelope of a little England abroad, he always remained with the portable boundaries of a racial identity he wanted to believe proof against alien influences.53 50 Ibid., 396. 51 Ibid., 400. 52 Ibid., 401. 53 James Buzard, “Trollope and Travel” in The Cambridge Companion to Trollope, ed. Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles, Cambridge:  cup, 170. Trollope’s fifth travel book, the privately printed account of his journey to Iceland, entitled How ‘the Mastiffs’ Went to Iceland (1878) is from this perspective an exception as there is little of the overt imperial project in it. However, it was connected with imperial wealth as it is an account of a trip he made to Iceland mostly in order to party and see the geysers on board the yacht named ‘the Mastiff’, owned by Mr. John Burns, who also happened to be the owner of the Cunard Lines and paid for all the expenses incurred on this trip. Trollope was one of fourteen guests invited.

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Trollope’s travel books, with their plethora of information, tables, statistics, figures, their bulk and their direct involvement in the British Imperial project in the Victorian period, differ considerably from the ‘sentimental’ narrative persona-​ centred travel books of other Victorian novelists like Charles Dickens or Samuel Butler, or from those aesthetically and artistically oriented non-​professional novelists who turned to travel writing, such as Alexander William Kinglake or Charles M. Doughty. In fact, they are much more like the exploration travel books of Richard Burton or David Livingstone, who thought of themselves as explorers as much as travellers, and who relied in their works on a skilful combination of scientific, imperial and aesthetic discourses in the manner pioneered at the end of the seventeenth century by William Dampier. According to Mark Cocker, a typical Victorian ‘imperialist’ travel book: “was a brisk, uncomplicated stream of data fixed in a semi-​autobiographical matrix. Primarily it described, explained, mapped and illuminated an unknown terrain. Its purpose and value was educational”.54 Samuel Butler, another prominent Victorian novelist, wrote just one travel book: Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino (1881), but it was innovative and unique in many respects. Butler textually merged in it experiences and impressions that he had gathered on his regular summer holidays which he spent in the Alpine parts of Piedmont in northern Italy and the neighbouring Swiss canton of Ticino—​areas which were popular with British, German and other European tourists throughout this period and which were described in the canonical “Handbooks” (guide-​books) for “travellers” (tourists). Murray’s Handbook to Switzerland started to be published in 1838, and Handbook to Northern Italy in 1843, while Karl Baedeker’s Switzerland. With the Neighbouring Lakes for Northern Italy, Savoy and the Adjacent District of Piedmont, Lombardy and the Tyrol Handbook for Travellers was published in 1863. Similarly to many Victorian travel book writers, Butler chose a subjective, impressionistic type of narration to contrast his narrative with the ‘holistic’ perspective of the Murrays and the Baedekers. However: Alps and Sanctuaries differs in several respects, […] from the typical impressionistic travel diary. Unlike Anne Jameson’s Diary of an Enuyeé, Frances Trollope’s A Visit to Italy or Charles Dickens’s Pictures from Italy, Alps and Sanctuaries is not just about travel, it is about art. Art is both a tool of exploration and a central theme of reflection.55 54 55

Mark Cocker, Loneliness and Time: The Story of British Travel Writing, New York, 6. Clarice Zdanski, “Samuel Butler, Local Identity, and the Periodizing of Northern Italian Art:  The Travel Writer-​Painter’s View of Art History”, in Samuel Butler, Victorian Art Against the Grain: A Critical Overview, ed. James G. Paradise, Toronto, 2007, 230.

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Butler’s views on art were very strongly held and very unorthodox. On the one hand, he was an amateur painter and draughtsman (Alps and Sanctuaries was illustrated with numerous drawings of his own), and he was strongly opposed to the process of the institutionalization of art criticism that was going on in the second half of the nineteenth century all over Europe, with its new university departments, canons and hierarchies. For example, he was preaching for “less word-​painting and fine phrases, and more observation at first-​hand”, for the establishment of “sketching clubs up and down the country”, and for consigning “Raffaele” as one of the “Seven Humbugs of Christendom”.56 Butler’s enthusiasm for amateur drawing and for long walks, as well as his iconoclastic and unorthodox views on art, dovetailed into another anti-​tourist element prominent in Alps and Sanctuaries: the insistence on the ‘off the beaten track’ character of his book. On numerous occasions he makes it clear that the landscapes and sanctuaries he draws and describes are away from those places which tourists visit with their Murrays and Baedekers. Alps and Sanctuaries can be perceived as belonging to the tradition of anti-​tourist, anti-​Grand Tour narratives, a tradition inaugurated by Lord Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, later developed by Butler in the late Victorian period, and continued in the twentieth century by such writers as D.H. Lawrence or Aldous Huxley. Whereas novelists with an established reputation, like Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope could rely on their celebrity status to help with the sales of their travel books, many aspiring writers felt forced to embellish their narratives with some new, original aspect(s) that could boost the sales of their own books, and that could be used in one or more paratexts:  the title, the front cover, or the blurbs. In his first two travel books Robert Louis Stevenson not only went off the beaten track of Victorian tourists, he also used original means of transport. In The Inland Voyage (1878) he described a kayaking trip (in a “Rob-​Roy canoe”) undertaken in August and September of 1876 on the rivers and canals of Belgium and northern France. In Travels with a Donkey in Cévennes (1879) he described an eleven-​day walk/​ride on and with a donkey in the mountainous region of Cévennes in south-​central France. Both these trips were relatively short, through regions previously unexplored by tourists (and both within easy and cheap reach from Britain), and they both “were made simply to be written about when they were over”.57 56 57

Samuel Butler, Alps & Sanctuaries of Piedmont & the Canton Ticino, Gloucester, 1986, 156. David Daiches, Robert Louis Stevenson. Glasgow, 1947, 170. The two later travel books of Stevenson, The Amateur Emigrant (1880) and The Silverado Squatters (1883), attempted to achieve their ‘distinctiveness’ in other ways. The former describes a ship passage to America in third class together with the poorest of emigrants; the latter, an unconventional

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In the case of Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome (1902), it was not only the means of transportation that was unique. Belloc was walking ‘in the footsteps’ of many British writers from Thomas Coryate, through William Wordsworth, to Samuel Butler and Thomas Hardy, for whom walking was much more than recreation,58 but his ‘walk’ was more than a walk. It was a thirteen hundred kilometre-​long religious pilgrimage, from Belloc’s home town of Toul in north-​ eastern France, to Rome, the holy city of Roman Catholicism. Belloc achieved the uniqueness of The Path to Rome through a careful combination of descriptions of a pilgrimage undertaken for deeply religious reasons (which allowed for idyllic explorations of the French and Italian countryside) with an apologetic history of the Roman Catholic Church and the hilarious (pun intended) humour of a flippant narrative persona “[t]‌he journey is narrated with the wit of Laurence Sterne and the spirituality of John Bunyan”.59 Belloc’s book and his persona were to influence the manner in which long distance walking was performed and in which it was described.60 Evelyn Waugh, a fellow travel writer and a fellow Roman Catholic apologist, in the first of his own travel books, Labels (1930), while describing different types of tourists and travellers, would comment on Belloc’s persona from The Path to Rome with some aloofness and detachment: […] The pilgrim on the path to Rome wears very shabby clothes, and he carries a big walking stick. In the haversack on his back he carries a map and garlic sausage, a piece of bread, a sketchbook, and a litre of wine. As he goes, he sings songs in dog Latin; he knows the exaltations of rising before day-​break and being overtaken by dawn many miles from where he slept; he talks with poor people and wayside inns and sees in their diverse types the structure and unity of the Roman Empire; he has some knowledge of strategy and military history; he can distinguish geographical features from scenery; he has an inclination towards physical prowess and sharp endurances; he maintains a firm reticence upon the subject of sex.61

58 59 60 61

honeymoon spent in a disused silver mine in northern California; both relish the anti-​ capitalist stance that was later to become a ‘trademark’ of writers like Jack London. See, e.g., Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, London, 118–​132. Brian D. Reed, “Hilaire Belloc”, in British Travel Writers, 1876–​1909, ed. Barbara Brothers and Julia Gergitis. Detroit, Washington D.C., London, 1997, 26. A.V. Seaton, “Tourism as Metampsychosis and Metenosomatosis” in The Tourist as a Metaphor of the Social World, ed. Graham M.S. Dann, 2002, 152. Evelyn Waugh, Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing, New York. 2006, 36.

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‘Artistic travel books’ in the Victorian period were written not only by professional novelists and men-​of-​letters, but also by travellers who were keen to describe their experiences in unorthodox ways; travellers like Alexander William Kinglake and Charles M. Doughty. It seems that these two writers were placed in the canon of British Victorian travel books not only as a result of the literary merits of their respective works, but because of the fact that travel books became ‘legitimate’ and ‘independent’ objects of literary studies. After Paul Fussell’s Abroad (1980), Kinglake and Doughty started to be perceived as precursors of the highly idiosyncratic and ‘artistic’ travel writers of the later, ‘golden age of travel writing’; in the inter-​war period; in particular of Norman Douglas and Robert Byron. Kinglake’s Eōthen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East was published anonymously in 1844.62 Although it was a best-​selling success with six more editions following in the wake of the original, the book was all but forgotten till the establishment of independent travel writing studies in the early 1980s, a new discipline that was quick in creating its canon. Eōthen was re-​published in 1982 with an important introduction by Jonathan Raban. Raban (born 1948) started his career as a literary scholar. He worked with professor Malcolm Bradbury and specialized in American literature. In the late sixties he wrote three books of literary criticism, Mark Twain:  Huckleberry Finn (1968) being one of them. In the course of the 1970s Raban gave up academia and turned to travel and travel writing. Old Glory: An American Voyage (1981) was his second travel book, in which he described his single-​handed journey in a small motor-​boat called “Old Glory” down the Mississippi river, in the wake (rather than the footsteps) of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn. Raban’s background was, therefore, ideal for writing an introduction which would offer a revisionist reading of a long forgotten writer; a reading that would place this writer in the canon (which was being formed) of British travel writing. Raban started with the claim that earlier readers had been deceived by Eōthen because the book is so easy-​going, funny and crisp. It seems so lightly and spontaneously done, this quizzical self-​portrait of an Old Etonian swanning idly around the Middle East in the 1830’s. Its determinedly

62

The fact that Kinglake did not reveal his name was explained by Gerald De Gaury, Kinglake’s biographer: “The book had to be anonymous. Apart from the natural inclination to anonymity, there was the effect that putting his name to a book would have on his solicitors. They did not approve of barristers [Kinglake was a barrister in the period 1837–​1856] revealing their thoughts in a book”. De Gaury, The Travelling Gent: The Life of Alexander Kinglake. London, 1972, 47.

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inconsequential surface masks a degree of artistic guile for which Kinglake has never received full credit.63 The two key ‘overlooked’ aspects of Eōthen which Raban concentrates on are: the degree of literary sophistication hidden under the veneer of off-​hand writing, and the mastery in the construction of Kinglake’s narrative persona, not to be confused with the real author, as the earlier readers of Eōthen seem to have done. On the former issue Raban states: “My excuse for the book is its truth,” he [Kinglake] announces in his Preface. One may let one’s eyebrow lift a fraction at that statement, since the Preface itself is an elaborate, and highly purposeful, lie. Kinglake passes off Eothen as a hastily written letter (a “scrawl”) to a travelling friend. It was no such thing. The book took Kinglake a decade to write. It was revised and re-​revised; its style of bright talk was the product of a long process of literary refinement.64 On the latter issue, Raban writes: The readers, eager only for more snapshots of oriental life, have cheerfully ignored the fact that the young man at the centre of the book is a distinctly callow and nasty piece of work. His chief memories are of school life at Eton. His only measure of landscape is a sentimental fondness for the Thames at Windsor, to which he refers on every possible occasion. He has an automatic condescension to all “orientals”, and is utterly unmoved when they suffer (as they do in almost every chapter) pain and death. Yet the young man is a triumph. With wit and skill, Kinglake paints his character as a representative Englishman, complete with all the representative vices Anglaises  —​the lolling hauteur, the moral indifference, the cold charm, the lazy scepticism. Eothen is not a “straight” autobiographical account of Kinglake’s travels; it is a dramatic monologue.65 Raban praises Kinglake for his use, or to be more precise, abuse or subversion of the conventions of the genre of the travel book:

63

Jonathan Raban, “Introduction” in Alexander William Kinglake, Eōthen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East, London, 1982, v. 64 Ibid., v. 65 Ibid., “Introduction”, vi-​vii.

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For Kinglake it was the perfect vehicle for his peculiarly devious kind of literary talent. In the travel book he could dissemble, improvise, mock his readers. Disguised as a humble reporter, he could tell tall and improbable tales, recreating himself in the character of the Victorian Englishman Abroad, he could bring off one of the finest pieces of satiric portraiture in nineteenth century writing.66 Kinglake’s Eothen is compared, by Raban, with the travel books of the inter-​war period which had been discussed by Fussell in Abroad (though Fussell’s book is not mentioned) as masterpieces of the genre: Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps, Evelyn Waugh’s Labels, Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana. “Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana draws so directly from Kinglake that there are moments when Byron comes close to plagiarism”.67 Raban finds Kinlake’s distinctive voice of “the modern English literary traveller”68 in Paul Theraux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, which had been published just seven years before Raban’s introduction. And this introduction culminates in a statement which sounds, perhaps, more like a literary blurb than a piece of literary criticism: Since its publication 140 years ago, Eothen has been teaching writers how to travel, how to walk the tightrope between “fiction” and “non-​fiction”, how to be clever, funny and true. It is one of the most deliciously nasty books in English literature.69 Another Victorian work written by someone who was not a professional novelist or a man of letters—​which from the vantage point of the twenty-​first century is important for the development of ‘artistic’ travel books written in English in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries—​is Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta. Doughty’s two-​volume tome was first published in 1888. It described his prolonged explorations of the Arabian Desert and was written in a very extravagant, highly mannered style, which on the one hand is the result of the intensive use of archaic language (artfully mixing the language of Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser and the King James Bible), and on the other of “Arabizing: the use of linguistic features at two levels—​phonological and lexical—​which are specifically and patently Arabic in origin and serve 66 Ibid., v–​vi. 67 Ibid., viii. 68 Ibid., viii. 69 Ibid., viii.

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to bring the reader closer to the Arabic way of life”.70 The original version of Travels in Arabia Deserta enjoyed only limited popularity, and it was only the abbreviated edition, published in 1908 with the new title, Wanderings in Arabia, which received more attention. T.E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, was a great enthusiast of the original version, and it was thanks to his perseverance that the second edition of the original, full version of Travels in Arabia Deserta was published in 1921 with a new preface by Doughty and an introduction by T.E. Lawrence. Norman Douglas, a novelist and a travel writer, also preferred the original version, and he wrote a review of it in which he not only expressed his admiration for the original, two-​volume version, but also attempted what is probably the first critical assessment of what the phrase “a good travel book” really means.71 As I argued in a paper entitled “Gentlemen Scholars in British Travel Writing”,72 Doughty’s Arabia Deserta and all of Douglas’s travel books might be seen as prime examples of the construction by British travel writers of their narrative personae as ‘gentlemen scholars’: seemingly ‘disinterested’ amateur scholars, singular, consciously eccentric and standing aloof from drab and uniform ‘Modern’ ways. Such constructions remained one of the few possibilities for prospective writers of the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, writing in English, who considered rendering their journeys (past, present or to come) through the (by then) firmly established genre of the travel book, and were employed by such writers as Aldous Huxley and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Women who turned to travel writing in the Victorian period were following in the wake of Mary Wollstencroft, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley. They also attempted to construct new types of narrative personae in order to attract readers. Male writers, as we have seen in the preceding paragraphs, came up with such figures as Kinglake’s eccentric English gentleman or Doughty’s gentleman scholar. Carl Thompson observed that women’s scope for originality in such constructions was more limited than men’s because “for a woman travel writer to become too magisterial in her opinions, or too coldly logical, or indeed too strident and impassioned, was to risk censure from critics, reviewers

70

Edward A. Levenston, “The Style of Arabia Deserta” in A Linguistic Analysis in Explorations in Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, ed. Stephen E.  Tabachnick, Athens and London, 2012, 95 (italics in the original). 71 Norman Douglas, “Arabia Deserta” in Experiments, Project Gutenberg E-​Book http://​ gutenberg.net.au/​ebooks03/​0300311.txt, last accessed 07.03.2019. 72 Grzegorz Moroz, “Gentlemen Scholars in British Travel Writing” in Travel and Identity:  Studies in Literature, Culture and Language, ed. Jakub Lipski, Springer, Cham, 2018, 9–​20.

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and readers for being ‘unfeminine’ ”.73 But, as Precious McKenzie persuasively argued, several women travel writers challenged the gender norms of the Victorian period, not in their rational, scholarly, fields but in athletic dimensions. Mary Kingsley, Isabella Bird Bishop, Lady Florence Caroline Dixie, Isabelle Savoury and Elizabeth LeBlond followed the call of critics of the ‘angel in the house’ Victorian ideal of womanhood (such as John Stuart Mill and Harriet Martineau) who “argued for individuality, freedom and education, coupled with the right to exercise female body and mind”.74 They rode horses, climbed mountains, hunted, and canoed wild waters, and even though Kingsley, Bishop, Dixie, and LeBlond “were not active champions of the feminist movement […] their readers interpreted their achievements as adventurers and sportswomen ‘as proof of female equality’ ”.75 Yet, in all their travel books adventures and sports remain only a part, albeit an important one, of their self-​representation. For example, in Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1897) she “chose to act as a ‘white man’ not only by mountaineering, but also by trading”.76 Alison Blunt noted of Travels in West Africa “[t]‌hroughout the text masculine roles of explorer, trader and scientific observer coexist with feminine self-​consciousness about appearance and behavior”, and added that “Kingsley’s humor throughout Travels in Africa destabilizes “any fixed authority of the narrator and becomes particularly important when there is the potential for conventionally imperialist and masculine statements”.77 So, her narrative persona is a complex construct incorporating such traits as: a bold, courageous and fit explorer (the first European to cross from the Ogowé to the Rembwé in a canoe, or to ascend Mount Cameroon by its south-​eastern face), a skilful trader (but also a fierce and competent critic of trading policies under the crown colony system), an amateur collector of fossils and specimens, but also a humorous, self-​deprecating observer mocking both male and female stereotypes.78 Although in Anglophone literary tradition in the Victorian period the standard way to publish one’s travel accounts, both for female and male writers, remained the travel book, there were also authors who preferred to publish 73 Thompson, Travel Writing, 84. 74 Precious McKenzie, The Right Kind of Woman: Victorian Travel Writers and the Fitness of an Empire, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, 2. 75 Ibid., 6. 76 Jacqueline Banerjee, “Mary Kingsley: Demystifying Africa”, http://​www.victorianweb.org/​ history/​explorers/​1.html., last accessed 07.03.2019. 77 Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa, New York, 1994, 72–​73. 78 Blunt, Travel, Gender and Imperialism, 73.

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shorter accounts, such as ‘travel sketches’, or ‘travel essays’, first in periodicals, and only later to collect, edit and publish them as ‘travel books’, a custom much more common with Polish writers of this period. Perhaps the most notable and persistent example of such a manner of textualizing one’s travel experiences was Henry James (1843–​1916). James, who was born, brought up and (home) educated in America, had been regularly visiting Europe, first with his family, later on his own, before finally turning into an ex-​pat, an outsider living and travelling in Italy, France and England. James’s itineraries, places and sights visited, which he described in his travel writing, reflect his deep interest in European art and history. The aesthetic discourse which dominates in them made him ‘the last Romantic’, textualizing his Grand Tours in the tradition of Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand, Stendhal and Browning.79 Henry James later dutifully edited and collected his travel essays and sketches in ‘geographically’ and ‘nationally’ conceived travel books. The first of them, A Little Tour of France, an account of a six-​week tour through this country, was published in 1884, just after it had been serialized in The Atlantic Monthly. The other two, English Hours (1905) and Italian Hours (1909), contained both travel essays and sketches which James had written over the preceding four decades and had published in various, mostly American, periodicals, plus ones he added while preparing and editing these two books. The fourth of his travel books, The American Scene (1907), contained fourteen chapters, ten of which had been previously published in popular American periodicals such as North American Review or Harper’s. The American Scene was the result of a tour of parts of his native country, which James had visited in 1905, for the first time in more than two decades. At that time his permanent place of residence was in Lamb House, Rye, East Sussex, England. Henry James considered himself ‘an amateur’ in the area of visual arts, of which he wrote so prolifically in sketches and essays collected in these four travel books, and he contrasted himself positively with ‘professionals’ in this field, such as John Ruskin, whose views he considered stiff and inauthentic. However, his attitude to the craft of writing was very professional. James scholars testify to his extensive reading of the travel narratives of such canonical writers as Goethe, Stendhal. Gautier, Howells, Taine, Emerson, Sterne, Johnson, Browning and others,80 and to his constant re-​editing 79 80

See Marten Dauween Zabel “Introduction” in Henry James, The Art of Travel: Scenes and Journey in America, England, France and Italy from the Travel Writings of Henry James, ed. and intro. Morton Dauwen Zabel, Freeport, 1970, 20. See, e.g., Tamara Follini, “Introduction”, xiii.

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and re-​writing of his texts, which is also very true about his treatment of his travel narratives, short and long. The degree of his professionalism as a writer is also testified by numerous differences between British and American versions of The American Scene, showing what in contemporary marketing parlance is called ‘localization’, adapting the product to the specific requirements of a market. 4

The ‘Generic Shift’ in Polish Travel Writing of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

The development of non-​fiction travel narratives in the second half of the nineteenth century in Polish literary tradition has already been introduced; to some extent in the first, theoretical chapter, where generic considerations were the main focus of the analysis. Hypotheses explaining the gradual disappearance of the usage of the word podróż as a generic term were presented there, as well as developments in some of the shorter travel writing forms published in newspapers and periodicals, such as listy and kartki. In this context two names were introduced: that of Józef Ignacy Kraszewski and Henryk Sienkiewicz, the two most prominent Polish novelists of the nineteenth ­century. This seems to be the proper moment to try to apply the comparative focus and look for the similarities and differences in the relationships between the development of the novel as a genre and travel writing in both Anglophone and Polish literary traditions. It has already been mentioned that the strong synergic bond between the novel and the travel book started to become important in the British novel from the middle of the eighteenth century, when the novel emerged as a literary genre and a marketable commodity, and celebrity novelists—​like Henry Fielding or Tobias Smollet—​used their personal fame and the popularity of travel narratives to enhance both their celebrity status and their financial stability. This synergic bond became even tighter with the novelists of subsequent generations such as Ann Radcliffe, Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. In Poland the novel as a genre started to develop later, only at the end of the eighteenth century. Most scholars consider Ignacy Krasicki’s Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki (1776) to be the first novel written in Polish. The book was published in English in 1992 as The Adventures of Nicholas Wisdom in Thomas H.  Hoslington’s translation, and its reviewer in the Chicago Tribune quite aptly summarized its intertextual richness, stating: “The book is a real find, not only in its dynamic synthesis of all the best literary models of the time—​Fielding’s Tom Jones, Rousseau’s

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Emile, Voltaire’s Candide, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—​but also in the fleet Swiftian prose”.81 Krasicki’s book is an example of what was later to be referred to by the German term Bildungsroman, the educational novel, and in this it was strongly influenced by the French novels mentioned by the Chicago Tribune reviewer, Rousseau’s Emile and Voltaire’s Candide. When it comes to the best English “literary models” listed in the review we have three novels which were all very much ‘travel novels’ (that is novels in which travel is the key or at least one of the key motifs): Tom Jones, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. For although the title of the crucial Swift novel is not mentioned explicitly by the reviewer (we merely have the phrase “the fleet Swiftian prose”), it is the relationships with this particular novel which seem to be strongest. For instance, as Przemysław Mączewski observed: […] as far as English literature is concerned the influence of Robinson and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is clear, particularly of the journey to the land of horses (Houyhuhnm), filled with biting allusions to relations in one’s own country.82 Although at the turn of the nineteenth century and in the first three decades of this century there appeared quite a number of various Polish novels, the disdain of the great Polish Romantic poets and their followers for this genre kept it at a relatively low profile; it was not till the time when these great Romantics were no more that the novel became a truly popular genre (both with readers and with critics), and that writers like Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (1812–​1887) and later Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–​1916) achieved the status of celebrity novelists on a par with the British celebrity novelists of the period. However, before this happened there had been quite a variety of Polish novels and novelists following the genre’s divergent developmental branches: the (pseudo) historical novels of Ignacy Krasicki—​Historia (1779) and Franciszek Jezierski—​Rzepicha (1790); the sentimental novels of Maria Wirtemberska—​ Malwina czyli domyślność serca (1816) (Malvina, or Heart’s Intuition83), Łucja

81

https://​nupress.northwestern.edu/​content/​adventures-​mr-​nicholas-​wisdom-​0, last accessed 27.04.2020 82 Przemysław Mączewski, “Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego Przypadki:  Szkic literacki. II, Pamiętnik Literacki, 3/​1/​4/​, 1904, 190” “… z angielskiej literatury znać wpływ Robinsona i Swifta podroży Guliwera, szczegolnie podroży do kraju koni (Houyhuhnm), przepełnionej uszczypliwemi aluzyami do stosunkow własnej ojczyzny”. 83 Maria Wirtemberska, Malvina, or Heart’s Intuition, transl. Ursula Philips, DeKalb, 2012.

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Barbara Rautenstrauchowa—​Emmelina i Arnolf (Emmelina and Arnolf) (1821); novels of manners:  Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz—​Dwaj panowie Sieciechowie (Two Masters Sieciechs) (1815), Fryderyk Skarbek—​Pan starosta (The Prefect) (1826); Gothic novels: Anna Olimpia Mostowska Strach w Zameczku (Fear in Zameczek) (1806), Matylda i Daniło (Matilda and Daniło) (1806). Kraszewski (1812–​1887) was almost an exact contemporary of such British novelists as Dickens (1812–​1870) and Trollope (1815–​1882), and there exist quite a few striking similarities between them: the ones which are most important from the perspective of this book is that they were all extremely prolific novelists who regularly enhanced their popularity and income through publishing their travel accounts in various forms. The development of Kraszewski’s own travel narratives in the decades between the 1830s and 1860s illustrate well the complicated nature of the dynamic changes to which Polish prose in general and Polish prose travel writing in particular were subjected during this period. These changes were on the one hand the result of the immense growth in the popularity of newspapers and magazines, in which not only shorter prose forms such as short stories or obrazki (little pictures), but also serialized novels were published as well as different forms of essays, feuilletons, and travel accounts. These changes were, on the other hand, the result of ideological shifts in the area of the theory and practice of artistic prose (both of the novel and also shorter genres), which in turn were caused to a considerable extent at least by the major ideological shift from the Romantic to the Positivist paradigm. And Kraszewski’s own travel narratives seem to illustrate very well the history and nature of these changes. Kraszewski was born in 1812, a year of great hope for all patriotic Poles for Poland to become bigger and grander and more independent than the supposedly ‘grand’ Wielkie Księstwo Warszawskie (Grand Duchy of Warsaw) created by Napoleon in 1807 in the part of what had been western Poland in the times before the country had been partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1812 these hopes were based on the assumption of Napoleon’s defeat of Russia. By 1812 Napoleon had defeated two of the three imperial powers which had finally partitioned Poland less than two decades earlier: Prussia and Austria, and in the summer of that year his Grand Army (helped by a very considerable Polish contingent) marched into the heartland of the third one:  Russia. But before the year ended the Grand Army was in retreat, chased by generals Kutuzov and Frost. Polish hopes were crushed and Kraszewski’s whole life was spent under the tight grip of Russian (as well as Prussian and Austrian) imperial dominance. The desperate attempts of Poles to regain independence, culminating in the two national uprisings of 1831–​1832 and 1863–​1864, were both bloodily crushed by Russia. During the heated and

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fervent period before the first of these uprisings, the November one, Kraszewski was a student of literature at the University of Wilno (Vilnius). He was arrested by the Russians on December 1830 together with a group of fellow student conspirators, and kept in prison for the next fifteen months. Throughout the rest of his life he was to remain a staunch Polish patriot, though a very sceptical one as far as a military uprising as a means of Poland’s regaining independence was concerned. Kraszewski is the most prolific Polish novelist; he wrote about two hundred and twenty novels altogether. About half of them are contemporary novels of manners, the other half historical novels and romances, and he was one of the most popular Polish novelists of the nineteenth century, an influential literary critic and journalist, and an ardent travel writer.84 Kraszewski’s first venture into the area of travel writing was quite surprising, for it was an instance of ‘imaginary travel writing’. The second part of the volume entitled Wędrówki literackie (Literary Wanderings), which was published in Wilno in 1839, was entitled “Pielgrzymka po stolicach” (Pilgrimage Through Capitals), and included accounts of his imaginary travels to Paris, Constantinople, Madrid, Berlin, and Rome. He was describing places which he had never visited, but about which he had read a lot, places which he, locked in a prison of the Russian Empire, expected never to see in reality. These were escapist and spiritual journeys in which the focus was not on the external, but on the internal aspects of these places. He attempted to show the genius loci of these places through intertextual literary parallels. And so, for example, when his narrative persona visits Berlin, he meets E.T.A. Hoffman there and offers his own phantasmagorical short version of “Kwiat paproci” (Fern Flower), strongly influenced by Hoffman’s writings. Kraszewski’s next travel account, Wspomnienia Wołynia, Polesia i Litwy (Recollections of Wołyń, Polesie, and Lithuania) (1840), is a book based not only on the author’s extensive tours in (former) Poland’s eastern borderlands, but also on the author’s extensive historical research. Wspomnienia Wołynia, Polesia i Litwy celebrates the Romantic writer’s generic freedom to mix in his podróż narration at times ironic, at times lyrical, and at times scholarly, with highly selective and highly subjective personal experiences giving place to long learned essays on the history and customs of these areas. Another characteristic feature of Wspomnienia Wołynia, Polesia i Litwy is—​at a time of mounting or budding nationalism in Europe at large and in these areas in particular—​a positive assessment of the multi-​cultural aspects of these territories:  a perspective not necessarily true historically, but nevertheless extremely positive 84

https://​culture.pl/​pl/​tworca/​jozef-​ignacy-​kraszewski, last accessed 08.03.2019.

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of the lands where Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians and Jews had been living side by side, and where tolerance prevailed. This book was followed by Obrazy z życia i podróży (Pictures from Life and Travels) (1842), an account of Kraszewski’s travels in another region of eastern Poland, that of Podlasie. Józef Bachórz, in his book Poszukiwanie realizmu: stadium o polskich obrazkach prozą w okresie międzypowstaniowym 1831–​1863 (The Search for Realism: A Study of Polish ‘Prose Pictures’ in the Period Between the Insurrections 1831–​ 1863) (1972), postulated the existence in this period of the separate genre of ‘obrazki prozą’ (‘prose pictures’), which he also called ‘obrazkowe faktografie’ (‘factual picture evidence’).85 Bachórz presented Kraszewski’s Wspomnienia z Wołynia as one of the key examples of this genre. According to Bachórz, although the presence of the first person narrator was not dominant, it was absolutely essential “as an argument for truthfulness”.86 In Wspomnienia Odessy, Jedysanu i Budżaku (Recollections of Odessa, Jedysan and Besarabia) (1845–​1846), his third book based on his travels through the lands which belonged to Poland before its loss of independence, Kraszewski revealed in the very first paragraph the importance of the ‘I’ in his writerly method, and commented on its novelty: I am not certain if of all the ways of describing journeys, the most suitable for the taste of our age is this newly adopted, and so much criticized (and very often justly so) confidential confession to the readers of one’s own fleeting impressions. This type of writing presents at the same time a visited country and a man who looked at it. In anage when all emancipated individualities, each with its physiognomy and particular character, push themselves boldly, almost shamelessly, onto the literary stage, it is necessary that the old fashioned, dry diaries of journeys have to be modified. Old descriptions of wanderings were reports from countries, places, from history and sometimes from research, but only rarely and probably accidently they painted the man who wrote them. The author, a traveller, appeared in them only in a subordinate role, in absolutely necessary places (for example, as in the case of Coxe, when, to his great annoyance, he had to sleep on straw, or like Klaproth, when he had to sleep outside near Vladykaukasus), but in general an author hid his own subject and did not allow his own ‘I’ to draw attention, which was directed at describing objects. But the very perception of objects was entirely different, the 85 86

Józef Bachórz, Obrazki prozą: stadium o polskich obrazkach prozą w okresie międzypowstaniowym 1831–​1863, Gdańsk, 87. Ibid., 98. “jako argument na rzecz prawdziwości”.

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way of looking at these objects was different, the focus was mostly on the official side. It is different and must be different today. The ‘I’ plays such a crucial role everywhere that it is very strong even in travels, often to the detriment of the main theme, and a traveller allows himself to be known better than a visited country. Is it better or worse? Is it progress or a step back? We do not know and we do not intend to research it, but we do not want to break the rules of our age and customs. And that is why we do not promise our readers in the journal of the little trip which follows anything more than a report of our impressions interconnected with the content of research and descriptions of places. We humbly ask to be excused that a bigger part of a little trip through our own country deals exclusively with details about it. We are convinced that when foreign travellers are allowed, when they happen to visit us, to deal with the smallest of trifles, usually ill-​conceived and understood, we are more than entitled to speak and write about ourselves, even in the most detailed way. In these details, unimportant at first sight, there is often surprisingly important knowledge; they often make us perceive things which we have disregarded for so long only because they are ours.87 87

Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Wspomnienia Odessy, Jedysanu i Budżaku, Warszawa, 1985, 9–​10. “Ze wszystkich sposobów opisywania podróży, nie wiem, nie najlepiej do smaku naszego wieku to nowo przyjęte, tyle krytykowane (a czasem bardzo słusznie), poufale zwierzenie się czytelnikom wszystkich przelotnych. Ono mu teraz maluje kraj zwiedzany i człowiek, który nań patrzał. W wieku, w którym wszystkie indywidualności wyemancypowane, które ze swą fizjonomią i właściwym charakterem, wysuwają się śmiało, bezwstydnie prawie, na literacką scenę, musiało następstwem koniecznym przyjść od zmodyfikowania staroświeckich suchych dzienników podróży. Dawne opisy wędrówek były to sprawozdania z kraju i miejsc, z dziejów i badań czasem, ale rzadko i chyba wyjątkowo malowały człowieka, co je pisał. Autor, podróżny, występował w nich tylko podrzędnie, w nieodbicie potrzebnych miejscach (na przykład, gdy jak Coxe musiał z wielkim swym strapieniu spać na słomie, jak Klaproth pod gołym niebem nocować u Władykaukazu), w ogólności zaś maskował się jak mógł, krył za swym przedmiotem i nie dozwalał swojemu ja zwracać na siebie uwagi, którą ściągał na opisywane przedmioty. Samo zaś nawet postrzeganie przedmiotów innym było wcale, inny punkt widzenia rzeczy, które ze strony urzędowej nade wszystko oglądano.//​Inaczej jest i musi to być dzisiaj. Wszędzie ja tak wielką gra rolę, że nawet w podróży wybitnie się maluje, często ze szkodą przedmiotu głównego, a sam podróżny więcej się daje poznać od zwiedzanego kraju. Lepiej to czy gorzej, postęp to czy cofnięcie? Nie wiemy, badać nie myślimy. I dlatego nie obiecujemy nic więcej czytelnikom naszym w następującym dzienniku przejazdki nad sprawozdanie z naszych wrażeń połączone z treścią poszukiwań i badań i opisem miejscowości. Z pokorą prosimy, że większa część przejazdki po naszym kraju zajmie się szczegółami o nim tylko. Przekonani jesteśmy, że gdy wolno zagranicznym podróżnym zwracać uwagę, jeśli się in trafi być u nas, na najmniejsze i mało ważne drobnostki, najczęściej źle pojęte i niezrozumiane, tym

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The first two paragraphs of Kraszewski’s Wspomnienia Odessy have been quoted so extensively because they reveal explicitly the change in the ways of relating travels which was occruing in Polish travel writing, to a large extent thanks to Kraszewski, whose popularity as a novelist, critic, and writer made him a model to follow by the next generation of writers. In these paragraphs Kraszewski gives the most straightforward and explicit explanation of the type of travel narratives which, by scholars of Anglophone travel writing, were called ‘sentimental’, ‘subject oriented’ or ‘Romantic’; narratives in which a narrative persona is crucial, the type of travel narratives which could be traced, as we have seen in the previous chapter, in English literary tradition to writers like Fielding or Smollett, who had been writing almost a century earlier. However, it should be observed that although Fielding’s or Smollett’s focus on ‘I’ was as strong as Kraszewski’s, they never made such explicit, clear, technical statements about it. Kraszewski, Fielding and Smollett were all professional novelists who travelled south, as they all openly admitted, first of all to recuperate their health, but also to sightsee and textualize their experiences in ways foregrounding their (literary) selves. Kraszewski’s sentimental manner of relating travel experiences was not greeted enthusiastically at first. The only surviving review of Wspomnienia Odessy, published in 1846 (when only the first two volumes of it were published), was written by Karol Witte who, along with Wspomnienia Odessy, analysed Kraszewski’s 1845 novel Pod włoskim niebem (Under the Italian Sky). This novel, generally regarded nowadays as weak and dull, was praised by Witte: “imagination and the perceptive eye of a researcher can be seen on every page”,88 whereas in Wspomnienia Odessy Kraszewski lacked imagination:  “when he wants to be a painter, he paints ordinary paintings, which are grouped not very fortunately. When he wants to be a poet, the flights of imagination never place him above the ordinary journals of writers relating their travels”.89 Kraszewski was also found wanting by Witte as a historian, although he admitted that Kraszewski tried hard to be one: “it would seem, therefore, that he should be a historian. However, this requirement—​insufficiently although laboriously

88 89

bardziej wolno nam o sobie mówić i pisać choćby najbardziej szczegółowie. W tych drobnostkach niewielkiej na oko wagi często się znajdzie ważniejsza nadspodziewanie nauka, często one naprowadzają nas na postrzeganie tego, co długo mimo oczu puszczaliśmy dlatego tylko, że swoje”. Quoted in Hertz, “Posłowie”, 433, “[…] imaginacja i przenikliwe oko badacza widne na każdej karcie”. Ibid., 433, “[…] jeśli jest malarzem, to obrazów zwykłych i nie dość szczęśliwie ugrupowanych, jeśli chce być poetą, to nigdzie polot imaginacji nie wznosi go wyżej nad powszechnich, dzienniki podróży swe notujących pisarzy”.

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fulfilled—​does not give this work proper and necessary features”.90 Kraszewski’s ‘sentimental’ method of reporting his travels was, however, soon to be appreciated both by critics and writers. As Sztachelska noted, Kraszewski’s novel approach to fiction, literary criticism and non-​fiction (particularly to his travel writing) was to have strong a resonance throughout the nineteenth century.91 The shift towards ‘sentimental’ travel writing, those narratives which focus on the central role of a narrative persona and towards the ‘artistic’ use of language in Polish literature around the middle of the nineteenth century,is also testified to by Michał Wiszniowski’s Podróż do Włoch, Sycylii i Malty (A Journey to Italy, Sicily and Malta) (1847). Wiszniewski was a professor of literature at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, and in his book he recollected and combined his three long trips to Italy and the Mediterranean. In his introduction (which was only published in the third edition of the book) Wiszniewski openly declared that his ambitious goal was to attempt “a thing which is difficult and never attempted: one [combining] historical truth with a description of the poet; to make a work of art out of the podróż which is not going to be assessed from separate pieces, but from clear, painterly impression, which will remain in the mind after its reading”.92 It should be noted that Wiszniewski used the term podróż in the generic sense both in the quoted fragment and in the title. When Kraszewski followed Wiszniewski on his own first ‘Grand Tour’ in 1858, he kept sending to two daily newspapers Gazeta Polska and Gazeta Codzienna his “Kartki z przejażdżki po Europie w roku 1858” (Postcards from a Trip in Europe in 1858). He was to travel extensively in southern and western Europe over the next few years, and was later to edit, extend and supplement his original 1858  ‘postcards’ in two volumes of Kartki z podróży 1858–​1864 (Postcards from Journeys 1858–​1864) (published in 1866 and 1874, respectively). He preserved the word kartki (postcards, cards), which he first used in the title of the series of short newspapers reports, in the title of his two thick volumes. In the first chapter of the first volume Kraszewski explained:“[i]‌n these sketchy notes, transitory leaves (postcards), one does not need to look for engaging

90 91 92

Ibid., 433, “[…] zdawałoby się wtedy, że powininen być historykiem, i ten jednak warunek—​ niedostatecznie choć pracowicie spełniony—​ nie nadaje tej pracy cechy właściwej i koniecznej”. Jolanta Sztachelska, “Reporteryje” i reportaże: dokumentarne tradycje polskiej prozy w 2 poł. XIX i na pocz. XX wieku (Prus, Konopnicka, Dygasiński, Reymont), Białystok, 1997, 14–​16. Michał Wiszniewski, Podróż do Włoch. Sycylii i Malty, Warszawa: piw, 1982, 5“.rzecz trudną i przez nikogo nie [zrobioną łącząc] prawdę historyczną z opisem poety, z podróży zrobić dzieło sztuki, które nie z kawałków, nie z wyjątków sądzić należy, ale z mocnego, wyrazistego, malarskiego wrażenia, które po przeczytaniu na umyśle zostanie”.

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adventures, original ideas, sophisticated or detailed descriptions, which are characteristic of other podróże”.93 What is important in this sentence from our perspective is not the discrepancy between Kraszewski’s narrative persona’s modesty, with more than a thousand pages of descriptions which are at times sophisticated and at times detailed, but the use of the term podróż in the generic sense. So, Kraszewski gave his own book the title Kartki (Postcards), but when he was to use a generic name for travel accounts in general, he came up with the name podróż(e), which shows that this term was still being used and this concept still alive in the 1860s, even though other, newer terms were also used to accommodate the fact that travel narratives in this period were usually first published in instalments in newspapers and periodicals. Some of them were later edited to various extents, as was the case with Kraszewski’s Kartki z podróży 1858–​1864. Sztachelska noted that in this period kartki (postcards) and later also letters (listy), with their brevity and form of direct address to the reader, were better suited to the form of periodicals. They became the most popular short forms of travel accounts used both by the greatest writers of the period, but also by “anonymous fillers of newspaper columns”.94 As we will see in the following paragraphs, while Kraszewski wrote kartki, Henryk Sienkiewicz, the writer who was to eclipse Kraszewski’s popularity both as a novelist and as a travel writer, preferred listy. The popularity of kartki is confirmed by a text which is extremely important from the perspective adopted here: Julian Klin Kaliszewski’s “Kartki nie-​ Kraszewskiego z podróży nie-​Sterne’a” (Non-​Kraszewski’s Postcards from a Non-​Sterne’s Journey). It has been recently re-​published as an essay in the Biblioteka Narodowa (National Library) volume Polski esej literacki:  Antologia (Polish Literary Essay:  An Anthology) (2017). The text takes the form of a travel journal from Kalinowski’s two sightseeing trips to wWestern Europe (Vienna, Munich, London, Paris, Venice, and Rome are its highlights) undertaken in 1867–​1868. It was first published in 1868 in a volume entitled Szkice (Sketches). This is, perhaps, the first text in Polish travel writing the organizing mode and dominant mood of which is humour. As argued in the previous chapter, in Anglophone literary tradition humour had become crucial much earlier in such non-​fiction travel narratives as Thomas Coryate’s Crudities (1611), Henry Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1754), and Tobias Smollet’s Travels Through France and Italy (1766). Mark Twain’s Innocents

93 Ibid., 8. 94 Sztachelska, „‘Reporteryje’, 19, “[…]“anonimowi wypełniacze gazetowych kolumn”.

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Abroad was published in 1869, a year after Kaliszewski’s Sketches. In fact, both Kaliszewski and Twain might have met in 1867 in Paris or in Rome. Kaliszewski and Twain both applied what James Buzard later called an anti-​tourist stance to mock hordes of their fellow tourists for their reverence for, and lack of understanding of, the Great Masters. The most striking difference between the style of Kaliszewski and Twain is that the Pole tried to appear to be much more erudite, and profusely quoted and misquoted95 classics in several languages. Kaliszewski, in his title, humorously ‘distanced’ himself and his narrative persona from the travel narratives of Kraszewski and Sterne, yet by doing so he at the same time (implicitly) admitted their ‘canonicity’ as travel writing. The title of his essay has an aura of the advertisements of today, which use the names of well-​known trademarks with the prefix ‘no’, or ‘not’ in order to seemingly put themselves in opposition to the real thing, but very often in order to bask, in this way, in their popularity. Kaliszewski chose Kraszewski and Sterne as trademarks in travel writing; the latter choice seems quite obvious. Sterne’s Sentimental Journey was, together with Goethe’s Italian Journey, a pan-​European benchmark for writers who travelled. The choice of Kraszewski and his Kartki was a much more unorthodox move, for Kraszewski’s publication of the first volume of Postcards from Travels 1858–​1864 had happened just two years before Kaliszewski went on his Grand Tour. It testifies to Kraszewski’s fast growing popularity as a novelist and as a travel writer. Kaliszewski adopted Kraszewski’s term kartki (postcards), and by adding the information that they were “not-​Kraszewski’s” postcards suggested that the content of his own text was different, even though he adopted Kraszewski’s form. Kaliszewski followed Kraszewski on the Grand Tour itinerary, but constructed his narrative persona not as an admirer of the great European tradition of Art, but as an iconoclast. This term seems to be quite appropriate in reference to Kaliszewski’s narrative persona, who in his essay ferociously attacked on the one hand the achievements of whole periods in the history of European painting and, on the other, hordes of ‘cultured’ tourists visiting the museums and galleries with these paintings. Thus, for example, when he focused on religious art he admitted that: The fanaticism which art awakened in the Middle Ages had [good] reasons for its existence. Faith, the ardent and deep faith of these times, was 95

For example, in the opening entry Kaliszewski uses Hamlet’s famous phrase in the original but without the definite article: “that is question”, Julian Klin Kaliszewski, “Kartki nie-​ Kraszewskiego z podróży nie Sterne’a” in Polski esej literacki: Antologia, ed. Jan Tomkowski, Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy Ossolińskich, 2017, 55.

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the cause of not faked enthusiasm and serious concern for the sensuously recreated ideals of this long gone era.96 And so, his argument goes, the bohomazy (daubings) of the Byzantine school could have had some moral value when they were created, but “does it mean that we should pay homage to something which, in no way, goes along with our convictions”.97 While seeing a reverent, international crowd of tourists in front of Raphael’s Sestine Madonna in Dresden, Kaliszewski remarks that if you dared to make even the smallest of shrugs to suggest that you did not understand the masterpiece: you will certainly see in return stereotypical sneers on all the faces, glaring in your eyes, showing that they really pity you because you are a dilettante and a blunderer, that you are blind and insensitive to the charms of this divinely executed painting. Poor them! They scold you for something for which they would be scolded by others if they wanted to be just a little bit more frank.98 As mentioned before, Henryk Sienkiewicz—​arguably the greatest (he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905) and undoubtedly the most popular Polish novelist (who was also a journalist and a travel writer) of the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century—​called his travel accounts listy (letters) rather than kartki (postcards). In fact, structurally there seems to be no difference between these two types of texts, and I believe that they could both be treated as instances of the same ‘secondary speech genre’, to use a term of Mikhail Bakhtin. Both ‘letters’ and ‘postcards’ were fragments of travel accounts meant to be published first in periodicals, and later, if there was enough popularity connected with them and their author, gathered together, edited to a lesser (Sienkiewicz) or greater (Kraszewski) extent, and

96

Ibid., 77, “Fantatyzm, jaki sztuka wzbudzała w średnich wiekach, miał powody swojej egzystencji. Wiara to, żywa i głęboka wiara owych czasów, była przyczyną nie udanego zapału i przejęcia się widokiem odtworzonych zmysłowo ideałów tamtowiecznych przekonań”. 97 Ibid., 77. 98 Ibid., 76, “[…] to na pewno w zamian ujrzysz stereotypowo szyderski uśmiech na wszystkich twarzach przytomnych wyciśnięty i bijący w oczy, że mocno cię żałują, żeś taki profan i niedołęga, skoroś ślepy a nieczuły na czary z tego bosko wykonanego obrazu. Biedacy! Ganią cię za to, za co by sami zostali zganieni przez innych, gdyby cokolwiek chcieli być szczersi”.

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published in book form as Listy z podróży … (Letters from journeys …) or Kartki z podróży (Letters from journeys …). Sienkiewicz went to the United States in 1876 and stayed there, mostly in California, till 1878; during this time he sent his ‘letters’ reporting on his trip in the same Gazeta Polska in which Kraszewski had published his ‘postcards’ almost two decades earlier. The book, Listy z podróży do Ameryki (Letters from a Journey to America), was published in 1880. There are two major issues connected with it. One is the problem of the ‘(non)fictionality’ of Sienkiewicz’s travel accounts; another is the fact that despite his story vastly differing from what Sienkiewicz really experienced in America, or perhaps because of this difference (or maybe regardless of it) Listy z podróży do Ameryki became the standard for the next generation of Polish (travel) writers—​this book is now perceived as one of the ur-​texts of Polish reportaż podróżniczy.99 In the book the narrative persona’s motives for travelling to the u.s.a. are not really unveiled. It is merely implied that it was a combination of wanderlust and the desire to write about his experiences. In fact, Sienkiewicz withheld from his readers the real motive for his venture. Back in Warsaw Sienkiewicz had been a member of a group of friends (and admirers) of the celebrated actress, Helena Modrzejewska, who was to have an astounding career in America under the name Modjeska. Forty years later she recalled in her memoir (written in English): My husband’s only desire was to take me away from my surroundings and give me perfect rest from my work […] Our friends used to talk about the new country, the new life, new scenery, and the possibility of settling down somewhere in the land of freedom, away from the daily vexations to which each Pole was exposed in Russian or Prussian Poland. Henryk Sienkiewicz was the first to advocate emigration. Little by little others followed him, and soon five of them expressed the desire to seek adventures in the jungles of the virgin land. My husband, seeing the eagerness of the young men, conceived the idea of forming a colony in California on the model of the Brook Farm. The project was received with acclamation.100 The artists-​colonists went to California and bought a one-​hundred-​and-​ninety acre farm in Anaheim (Disneyland Park was opened on this land in 1955), but the combination of lack of farming and linguistic skills of the colonizers

99 See, e.g. Niedzielski, 1966: 55, Sztachelska, 1997: 21–​22. 100 Helena Modjeska, Memories and Impressions, New York, 1910, 17.

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led to the project’s failure. Modjeska (and her family) stayed on in America, while most of the admirers (including Sienkiewicz) left for Poland. The story of Modjeska’s and Sienkiewicz’s utopian Californian project (and Modjeska’s amazing career as an actress in America) has been dealt with from various perspectives by a few American writers, like Willa Carter and Susan Sontag (in her 1999 novel In America, Helena Modrzejewska became Maryna Zalenska, while Henryk Sienkiewicz became Ryszard Kierul). In many ways, Sienkiewicz’s travel book is more ‘fictitious’ than Sontag’s novel, and his narrative persona is as much a literary construct as the protagonists of his later, best-​selling and iconic historical Trilogy. In Listy z podróży do Ameryki Sienkiewicz unveiled, refined, and polished his skills as a journalist and as a novelist. It was his ability to combine humour with artistic descriptions of nature, his ear for dialogue, as well as his concern for American (and Polish) society which appealed to his readers (and some of his fellow writers). His persona is not a colonist-​farmer bound on a doomed project, vying, together with other colonists-​admirers, for the attention of Helena, the star, to the accompaniment of the tantrums of her jealous husband, but rather an idealistic young writer turned hunter, who lives rough in the wild nature of northern California—​beautiful, pristine but dangerous—​and helps a squatter called Dżak (Jack) built his cabin. Sienkiewicz returned to Poland in 1879, and his career as a celebrity traveller and writer developed swiftly. He was to travel extensively over the next three decades, in Europe and beyond. In 1890 he went to Africa. The literary output of this trip comprised twenty-​two letters; twenty of which were written after his return to Poland, so they were ‘letters’ only in a literary and marketing sense, whereas in fact they were recollections. Listy z Afryki (Letters from Africa) was published as a book in 1893. Two months before he started his African journey, in October 1890, he wrote in a letter to a friend, Mścisław Godlewski, that he was going to write “a series of letters from the journey, in the manner of the American ones, which because of their content, pictures, style, and, last but not least, persona of the author, better known today than during the American trip, could be a great and extraordinary attraction for the readers of Słowo”.101 Sienkiewicz’s persona of an erudite writer and a big game hunter dominates the narrative. Hunting expeditions in Zanzibar and German East Africa are described in a manner very similar to those used slightly earlier by such explorers 101 Henryk Sienkiewicz, Listy do Mścisława Godlewskiego (1878–​1904), ed. Edward Kiernicki, Wrocław:  Wydawnictwo Ossolińskich, 1956, 53, “[…] szereg listów z podróży na kształt amerykańskich, które by ze względu na swą treść, obrazy, styl i wreszcie osobę autora, bardziej dziś znaną niż za czasów amerykańskiej wycieczki, mogły stanowić wielką i nadzwyczajną atrakcję dla czytelników Słowa”.

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and adventurers in Africa as Burton, Stanley, and Livingstone. The European gentleman-​explorer-​hunter’s tropical attire, a pith helmet and a hunting rifle, are identical; so are the frame of mind and the imperialist discourse. Sienkiewicz was in Eastern Africa in 1891. Just a year earlier another Pole, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, had on a steamboat up the river Congo, to take up a job as captain of another steamboat. He had a three-​year contract with the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-​Congo. For a few days he was captain of a steamer, the SS Roi des Belges, substituting for the ill captain, Koch. Soon, he became ill himself. Depressed and dejected, he decided to break his contract and return to Europe. Before he fell ill, during his first sixty-​seven days in Africa, he had kept a diary, which almost a decade later helped him to write a novella entitled Heart of Darkness (1899). In the meantime Korzeniowski settled in England, became a professional writer, and shortened and Anglicized his name to Joseph Conrad. Chinua Achebe’s accusations of Conrad as being “a thoroughgoing racist” started a heated debate which has now been rumbling for decades, in which scholars of post-​colonialism, many other ‘isms’, and those conceiving of themselves as writing ‘after theory’ have argued more or less persuasively about Conrad’s depiction of Africa and Africans, introducing many ideological interpretations which could be located somewhere between considering him ‘a bloody racist’ and a humanist, a liberal novelist writing during the peak period of Imperialism.102 But, while Conrad’s novella is a highly nuanced work of fiction allowing for such contradictory argumentations, Sienkiewicz’s Podróże do Afryki is a much more straightforward podróż, in which the imperialist ideology is also much more straightforward. During his visit in Africa Sienkiewicz stayed in and walked around the then British protectorate of Zanzibar, then went on a hunting expedition through German East Africa, an area of Africa famously and ironically described by Conrad’s Marlow as a place where “jolly pioneers of progress drink their jolly lager beers”.103 The main river there, the Kingani, was described by Sienkiewicz in a manner quite similar to Conrad’s artistic, impressionistic descriptions of the Congo, when he presented the river as a place of not only a journey in space, but also in time. For Sienkiewicz’s narrative persona: “The Kingani has some charm of mysteriousness. When one looks upstream, one has an impression that these lazy waves come from some

102 See, e.g., Attie de Lange, Gail Fincham with Wiesław Krajka (eds.), Conrad in Africa: New Essays on “Heart of Darkness”, Lublin, 2002. 103 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1990, 145.

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murky land”.104 This country is described a bit later as “pre-​deluvian” and “still not prepared for human life”.105 Conrad’s Marlow described the horrors of an unnamed European colony, which is unanimously recognized as the Belgian Congo. While looking at the map of Africa in a waiting room, he not only poked fun at German “pioneers of progress”, but also managed to convey his positive opinion of British colonialism in Africa: “[t]‌here was a vast amount of red—​good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there”.106 Sienkiewicz was also generally quite impressed by the British rule in Zanzibar: They say about England that it has an iron hand wearing a velvet glove. This hand never flays off the external glamour, it caresses, it offers gifts, but at the same time there are anchored in the Zanzibar harbour two dreadnoughts within shot’s range: vicious Marathon and Redbreast, ready to support the consul’s kind word with fire and iron.107 Sienkiewicz was also in favour of German colonization, claiming that the Germans were not so experienced in their colonizing mission as the British, but still competent and civilizing; he even openly argued against accusations of them being cruel to the local population. “There is a lot of exaggeration [in such accusations], particularly if you take into consideration the fact that the country is under purely military rule. This rule is harsh, because this is, in a sense, part of the German character, but their goal is not, by any means, extermination of the local population”.108 But the highest praise of Sienkiewicz’s narrative persona in his Listy is reserved for yet another type of outpost of European civilization—​French Catholic missions. He stayed in such missions both in Zanzibar and in German

104 Henryk Sienkiewicz, Listy z Afryki, Warszawa, 1893, 188, “[…] jest w Kingani jakiś urok tajemniczości. Gdy się patrzy w górę rzeki, ma się wrażenie że ta leniwa fala nadchodzi z jakiejś mrocznej krainy”. 105 Ibid., 190, “[…] przedpotopowej, nieprzygotowanej jeszcze na życie ludzkie krainy”. 106 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 145. 107 Sienkiewicz, Listy z Afryki, 113, “O Anglii mówią, że ma ona żelazną rękę, przybraną w aksamitną rękawiczkę. Ta ręka nie obdziera nigdy z zewnętrznego blasku, gładzi, sypie dary, ale swoją drogą w porcie zanzibarskim stoją na odległość strzału dwa pancerniki: straszny „Marathon“ i „Redbreast“, gotowe w danym razie poprzeć grzeczne słówko konsula ogniem i żelazem”. 108 Ibid., 170, “Jest w tym dużo przesady, zwłaszcza jeśli uwzględni się, że kraj jest pod zarządem czysto wojskowym. Są to rządy surowe, bo to poniekąd leży w charakterze niemieckim, ale bynajmniej nie mające na celu wytępienia miejscowej ludności”.

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East Africa. He presented them as an artist resorting to aesthetic, artistic, and pastoral discourse, but also as a political journalist arguing for them in a passionate way: “they fight with slavery and support the European humanitarian anti-​slavery movement stronger than other means, stronger even than dreadnoughts and guns. Moreover, they fight with Islam, the greatest scourge of ­Africa”.109 In Listy z Afryki Sienkiewicz, in a manner similar to that of Kraszewski from his Kartki z podróży, written some fifteen years earlier, testified (in a similarly indirect way) to the existence in Polish literary tradition at the end of the nineteenth century of the wide generic understanding of the term podróż. Sienkiewicz wrote about Father Le Roy, who helped him to prepare a hunting itinerary and described him as not only a missionary, but “a hunter and a learned geographer”.110 Father Le Roy gave him his “opis podróży”111 to read, with a description of an expedition up the river Tani undertaken in order to find a location for a new mission. Sienkiewicz was full of admiration for Father’s Le Roy ability to give “to the reader such a three dimensional picture of the country and people […]”112 in his podróż. So, Sienkiewicz, when confronted with an obviously non-​fiction (and also ‘artistic’) account of a journey, wrote about it using both the full version (opis podróży) and the shortened version (podróż) of the terms he clearly considered generic, even though he himself used for his text the new generic term listy. Some Polish writers of the period who travelled and textualized their accounts followed Sienkiewicz, calling their accounts listy, for example: Gabriela Zapolska wrote Listy paryskie (Parisian Letters) (1890), Adolf Dygasiński wrote Listy z Brazylii (Letters from Brazil) (1900), while others, like Bolesław Prus, wrote kartki in the manner of Kraszewski; in 1875–​1880 Prus had a column in Kurier Warszawski, entitled “Kartki z podróży”. Władysław Reymont, another journalist and a Nobel Prize-​winning novelist, in 1894, just a year after Sienkiewicz’s Listy z Afryki, wrote and published in Głos a travel account entitled “Pielgrzymka do Jasnej Góry” (A Pilgrimage to Jasna Góra). This text is perceived by contemporary scholars (Niedzielski, Sztachelska) as the first proper reportaż podróżniczy in Polish, although Reymont himself did not use this, or any other generic or quasi-​generic term in it. 109 Ibid., 154, “[…] walczą z niewolnictwem i wspierają europejski humanitarny ruch przeciwniewolniczy potężniej, niż wszelkie środki, potężniej nawet, niż pancerniki i działa. Powtóre walczą z islamem, tą największą plagą Afryki”. 110 Ibid., 123, “[…]myśliwy i uczony geograf”. 111 Ibid., 123. 112 Ibid., 123, “[…] czytelnikowi wypukły obraz kraju i ludzi”.

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Reymont walked two hundred kilometres from Warsaw to Częstochowa with its Marian sanctuary at Jasna Góra, together with more than four thousand other pilgrims, mostly Polish peasants. The style he used is very similar to Sienkiewicz’s. The narrative persona of the writer is constantly foregrounded. He often relies on dialogue, and is witty and distanced through his ironic humour. Structurally, “Pielgrzymka do Jasnej Góry” is divided into eighteen pieces, bearing the names of the towns and villages Reymont’s narrative persona and his fellow pilgrims walked through; these individual pieces might have been called kartki or listy. At the end of the nineteenth century many Polish celebrity novelists, playwrights and journalists—​ Sienkiewicz, Kraszewski, Reymont, Dygasiński, Zapolska, Konopnicka—​travelled and textualized these experiences in travel accounts which they usually entitled with one of the two words: kartki or listy, even though they still occasionally also used the generic term podróż, usually when considering the ‘classics’ and/​or the history of this genre. These ‘notes’ and ‘letters’ were usually first published in newspapers or magazines and later—​spurred by their authors’ celebrity status—​published as books. With the advent of the twentieth century a new term—​reportaż podróżniczy—​started to replace kartki z podróży and listy z podróży as a generic umbrella term which was to account for changes in the techniques in non-​fiction travel writing. However, it was not till after the Second World War and Poland’s coercion in the Soviet camp that it became the central non-​fiction travel writing genre. All these three generic labels—​kartki z podróży, listy z podróży, and reportaż podróżniczy—​are, in their basic versions, short and journalistic forms which developed as a result of a growth in popularity from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards in both the everyday and periodical press and the relative weakness of the book market. A similar phenomenon of development of short journalistic forms of non-​ficional travel writing took place within other ‘minor’ literary traditions and took the shape of the Italian terza pagina travel narratives and the Hispanic crónica de viaje. At the same time the strength of the British and American book markets—​ being the result of the strength of the British and American economies as well as reading habits—​sustained the popularity of travel books throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Of course, newspapers and periodicals became so extremely popular there that not only the great majority of novels were first published in periodicals in instalments, but also quite a few short non-​fictional travel narratives were published in this way. The most notable example in this area was the Anglo-​American novelist Henry James, who for decades kept publishing his short non-​fictional travel accounts first in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, the genre of the travel

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book was the most obvious choice of medium for the majority of British and American travel writers in the nineteenth century (also in the twentieth century) and in fact, practically the only medium available to explorers. For in the nineteenth century there were still explorers, and ‘exploration travel books’ continued to be written. They were, by no means, marginal. The fact that such exploration books have not been analysed in this chapter is the result of the focus on ‘aesthetic travel books’(also called ‘modern travel books’ by Carl Thompson113) adopted in this study. Such a focus made me select, out of the whole spectrum of non-​fictional travel narratives which had been published in Britain in the eighteenth century, those works in which a very clear shift took place from the description of exotic places to the self-​descriptions of narrative personae travelling relatively short distances over beaten tracks, as was the case with Fielding and Smollett. Such books were unusual and uncharacteristic for the period, as scholars from Charles Batten to Nigel Leask clearly showed, but such travel books were to become more and more central to the genre throughout the nineteenth century and then, in the twentieth, when exploration travel books were no more, the very mainstream of it. Carl Thompson located the end of ‘exploration travel books’ at around 1900 and argued that: [w]‌ith the expansion of the university system and growing academic specialisation, many forms of disciplinary inquiry traditionally conducted through and disseminated as ‘voyages and travels—​e.g. geography, ethnography, natural history—​now sought to dissociate themselves from a genre increasingly associated with anecdotalism and amateurism.114 The nineteenth-​century exploration travel books, written by Alexander von Humboldt, Richard Burton, David Livingstone or H.M. Stanley, were all “literary as well as scientific constructs”.115 Nigel Leask, in Curiosity and Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–​1840 referred to Alexander von Humboldt as “the paramount traveller of the period”,116 and showed his “struggle against what he considered to be the deleterious effects of purging aesthetics from scientific discourse, and equally of relegating scientific content from literature increasingly construed in terms of the ‘romantic ideology’ ”.117 Ultimately though, at 1 13 Thompson, Travel Writing, 202. 114 Thompson, “Nineteenth-​Century Travel Writing”, 123–​124. 115 Ibid., 116. 116 Nigel Leask, Curiosity and Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–​1840, Oxford, 2002, 6. 117 Ibid.

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the threshold of the twentieth century, the exploration travel books, with their ‘pleasurable instruction’, disappeared, and it was the ‘egotist’, ‘modern’, ‘aesthetic’ones not only remained, but thrived and developed for all their predictability and intellectual limitations.

pa rt 2 Two Case Studies of the Travel Narratives of Four British and Polish Twentieth-​Century Travel Writers

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­c hapter 5

Parallaxes of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Ryszard Kapuściński Traditionally, over the last two centuries—​both in Anglophone and Polish first person non-​fiction travel writing, i.e. in travel books, podróże and reportaże podróżnicze—​the main form of retrospective narration has been that of a journal or a diary. The minor differences which the historians and theoreticians of life narratives postulate to exist between journals and diaries1 are of no consequence from the perspective adopted in this book. It is also of little consequence to what extent the final version has followed some regularly kept diary or has diverged from it through subsequent re-​writing.2 Most travel books, podróże, and reportaże podróżnicze, are linear, retrospective narratives, usually following a tripartite pattern: of departure, the journey itself, and return. And in most cases, the retrospection does not go back very far, usually extending to a few months, a year or a couple of years at most. Most travel writers (and particularly professional travel writers) write their accounts and publish them swiftly after the journey’s end, although some ‘artistic’ travel books take much longer to write. Two famous British travel books which followed the journal/​diary textualization process described above but took much longer to complete are Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen (1844) and Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937). As Jonathan Raban, himself both a major travel writer and a critic, wrote in his introduction to Eothen the book took a decade to write and was laboriously revised over and over again.3 A similar method of rigorous revisions and re-​writings administered on the text till it acquired the varnish of apparent off-​handed spontaneity was performed nine decades later by Robert Byron. Although predominant, travel books, podróże, and reportaże podróżnicze following relatively closely in the wake of real journeys are not the only ways of textualizing those journeys. There exists an approach that, from the perspective of the taxonomy of life narratives, is much more similar to that of a memoir than of either a diary or a journal. I would like to argue that this type of travel narration can be best metaphorically captured through the figure of a ‘parallax’, and that the travel narratives of Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–​2011) and 1 See, e.g., Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, Minneapolis, 2001, 193–​196. 2 See Forsdick, New Approaches, 24. 3 See Raban, “Introduction”, v.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004429611_007

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Ryszard Kapuściński (1933–​2007) exhibit many similarities, even though the generic paradigms in which they were written are quite different. According to Artemis Cooper, the biographer of Patrick Leigh Fermor, in 1966 Fermor nursed the idea of giving the title Parallax to the book he was working on at that time.4 Most often used in astronomy, the word alludes to the difference in the appearance of an object seen from two different angles. It seemed a good way to draw attention to the gap between the nineteen-​year-​old walker and the forty-​nine-​year-​old writer. The initial enthusiasm did not last long, though; Fermor got stuck while writing Parallax and then abandoned the project. He returned to it, however, in the early 1970s and worked laboriously on it until 1977, when the book finally appeared. But Parallax, as the title of the first book to describe Fermor’s walk across Europe, was replaced by an intertextual, nostalgic phrase from a poem written by Louise MacNeice, entitled Twelfth Night: “For now that the time of gifts is gone …”. A Time of Gifts seemed to Fermer to be appropriate as a title to the ‘winter journey’ of a boy of nineteen through the Europe of 1934, described from the perspective of a man who was past sixty when the book finally appeared: “For now that the time of gifts is gone-​-​/​O boys that grow, O snows that melt,/​O bathos that the years must fill/​ Here is dull earth to build upon/​Undecorated; we have reached/​Twelfth Night or what you will … you will”. As we can see, MacNeice’s poem “Twelfth Night” leads directly to more intertexts, the most obvious of which is Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, bringing with it evocations of Christmases long past, celebrated with traditional medieval gusto, from the first day of Christmas to the twelfth day (and night) of Christmas, the Eve of the Epiphany, celebrated on January 6. As Cooper explained, it was Fermor’s friend and editor John (Jock) Murray who had not been happy with the learned title Parallax, and insisted on its change to a title more commercially oriented.5 I am convinced that ‘parallax’, abandoned by Fermor and Murray, can nevertheless serve very well as a metaphor as well as a synecdoche for a kind of travel narrative in which the narrator, an experienced traveller, contrasts his experienced persona with himself at the beginning of his mind-​transforming wanderings. Fermor, after his ‘Great Trudge’ (as he later referred to his venture) on foot across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (as he, in his heliophilia, insisted on calling Istanbul), undertaken between December 1933 and January 1, 1935, stayed in the Balkans, where he learnt the languages and enjoyed life. When World War ii broke out he went to Britain to volunteer. He

4 Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, New York, 2012, 325. 5 Ibid., 325–​331.

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served with the Special Operations Executive in Crete, occupied by the Germans. He distinguished himself by masterminding and carrying out the kidnapping of German general Heinrich Kreipe, the regional commander of the island, whom Fermor with the help of Greek partisans managed to lead all the way through the mountains of Crete to a boat on the southern coast which took them to Alexandria (occupied by the British at that time). Fermor alluded to these events in A Time of Gifts, mostly in the intertext of an introductory letter opening his travel book, addressed to a great war-​time friend and fellow soe officer, Xan Fielding. After the war Fermor led a wandering life and gradually established his reputation (mostly) as a travel writer. His first travel book, The Traveller’s Tree, published in 1950, was a classical narrative recounting his travels (with a group of friends) in the West Indies in 1947–​1948. Fermor’s growing sentiment for his adopted patria of Greece led to prolonged wanderings in different nooks and crannies of continental Greece. In 1961, with his wife Joan, he bought a plot of land in the remote village of Kardamyli on the Peloponnese coast, and there they built a comfortable house on a quiet bay (to Fermor’s own design). Two books from this period described the extensive travels which Fermor with his wife undertook in Greece: Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958) and Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966). As I argued in the paper “Gentleman Scholars in British Travel Writing”, it was his extended studies on Greek civilization, ancient and modern, which led to the writing of these two travel books. The narrative persona of both of them may be placed within the category of ‘a gentleman scholar’, where the narrative persona is foregrounded as an amateur scholar, expert in areas of knowledge of his own choosing.6 In Fermor’s Mani and Roumeli this expertise is extended into such areas as the Hellenic past, literature and language, the Byzantine history of art, the history of Greece under Ottoman rule, and the history of modern Greece. The Greeks the Fermors meet during their wanderings are described with love, care, warmth and humour, while the strata of the past and customs are laboriously revealed in the erudite narration. Mani and Roumeli are distinguished by their passionate erudition, but their structures resemble those of other British travel books when the ‘scholarship’ of the narrator is allowed to be the centre of focalization: thus the chronologically described wanderings are interspersed with learned essays devoted to specific aspects of Greek history and culture. At times these essays verge on the poetic, fantastic and/​or bizarre. For example, there is a passage in chapter 6 Moroz, “Gentlemen Scholars in British Travel Writing”, 9–​20.

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three of Mani, entitled “Kardamyli:  Byzantium Restored”, in which Fermor describes a visit to the hut of a Mani fisherman, Estavrios Mourzinos, who is reputed by local hearsay to be the last descendent of the Byzantine emperors. Estavrios behaves humbly and appropriately: “That’s what they say,” he said, “but we don’t know anything about it. They are just old stories …” He poured out hospitable glasses of ouzo, and the conversation switched to the difficulties of finding a market for fish, there was so much competition. There is a special delight in this early morning drinking in Greece.7 With his skilful novelistic narration, utilizing free indirect speech stressing the banal, everyday topic, the conversation quickly switches to the “difficulties of finding a market for fish, there was so much competition”, with the delight of the persona in such conversations and situations, especially as they are carried out ornamented with the customary drinking of a strong local liquor, ouzo, even though it is an early-​morning visit. Spurred on by ouzo, the narrative persona’s imagination is allowed to run high and wild. The fragment which follows reads: Old stories indeed. But supposing every link were verified, each shaky detail proved. Supposing this modest and distinguished looking fisherman were really heir of the Paleologi, descendant of Constantine xi and Michael viii the Liberator, successor to Alexis Comnène and Basil the Bulgar-​Slayer and Leo the Isaurian and Justinian and Theodosius and St. Constantine the Great? And, for that matter, to Diocletian and Heliogabalus and Marcus Aurelius, to the Antonines, the Flavians, the Claudians and the Julians, all the way back to the Throne of Augustus Caesar on the Palatine, where Romulus had laid the earliest foundations of Rome? … The generous strength of the second glass of ouzo accelerated these cogitations.8 We do get something of a minor parallax here. Long before A Time of Gifts there is a hiatus in perspective between the sober (in both senses of the word) narrative persona describing an early morning visit to the hut of a hospitable fisherman, and the figure of Fermor-​traveller, fascinated by Greece’s ancient

7 Patrick Leigh Fermor, 2006. Mani: Travels In the Southern Pelopnnese, New York, 2006, 41. 8 Ibid., 44.

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heritage, discernible (even if only through an ouzo-​inspired flight of fancy) in modern Greece’s remote villages, willingly succumbing to a chat with the fisherman, who has turned out (even if only in the narrator’s fancy) to be a true descendent of Byzantine emperors. Fermor makes fun of the extended search for documents to demonstrate the imperial lineage all over the post-​Byzantine world, and becomes even more involved in this vision: Envoys returned empty-​handed from Barbados and the London docks […] Some Russian families allied to Ivan the Terrible and the Palaelogue Princess Anastasia Tzarogorodskaja had to be considered […] Then all at once a new casket of documents came to light and a foreign emissary was despatched hot foot to the Peloponnese, over the Taygetus to the forgotten hamlet of Kardamyli […] By now all doubt had vanished. The Emperor Eustrarius leant forward to refill the glasses with ouzo for the fifth time. The Basilissa shooed away a speckled hen which had wandered indoors after the crumbs. On a sunny doorstep, stroking a marmalade cat, sat the small Diadoch and Despot of Mitra.9 It all leads to a description of the coronation of Eustrarius, the Emperor-​ Fisherman, and the splendours and glories of the city of Byzantium re-​created in a vision, at the same time tongue-​in-​cheek and overpowering: Constantinople appeared beyond our bows, its towers and bastions glittering, its countless domes and cupolas bubbling among pinnacles and dark sheaves of cypresses, all of them climbing to the single great dome topped with the flashing cross that Constantine has seen in a vision on the Milvian bridge. There, by the Golden Gate, in the heart of the mighty concourse, waited the lords of Byzantium; the lesser Caesars and Despots and Sebastrocrators, the Grand Logethete in his globular headgear, the Counts of the Palace, the Sword Bearer, the Chartophylax, the Great Duke, the thalassocrats and polemarchs, the Strateges of the Cretan archers, of the hoplites and the peltasts, and the cataphracts, the Silentiaries, the Count of the Excubitors, the governors of the Avian Themes, the Clissourarchs, the Grand Eunuch and (for by now all Byzantine history had melted into a single anachronistic maelstrom) the Prefects of Sicily and Nubia and Ethiopia and Egypt and […]10

9 Ibid., 45–​46. 10 Ibid., 45–​46.

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“The anachronistic maelstrom” continues for a few more pages with verbal virtuosity, combining historical names with linguistic fireworks, interspersed with the fisherman’s cliffhanging gale story. The ending of the chapter is once again realistic: The bottle was empty … The schoolmaster’s shadow darkened the doorway. “You’d better hurry,” he said. “The caique for Acropolis is just leaving”. We all rose to our feet, upsetting in our farewells a basket of freshly cut bait and a couple of tridents which fell to the floor with a clatter. We stepped out into the sobering glare of noon.11 I have quoted just some selected passages from the third chapter of Mani, in ordere to show the lavishness of Fermor’s style, the depth of his research and the intensity of his love for Greece and Greeks. It took Fermor even longer to polish the fragments of Parallax, which was to be transformed into the masterpiece A Time of Gifts. I believe that his laborious method of numerous corrections and ever new renditions of individual fragments can be compared with another major novelist and master-​stylist of the English language: James Joyce, who spent seven years on Ulysses (1914–​1921) and fifteen on Finnegan’s Wake (1924–​1939). As alluded to before, the ‘parallax effect’, so central to A Time of Gifts, the dramatic and nostalgic power of the book, lies to a large extent in these shifts of perspective between the two figures of Patrick Leigh Fermor. One, a teenager, a dropout from a series of public schools, living on the fringe of the bohemian world of London and inspired by Robert Byron. A young travel writer and a great enthusiast of the “Byzantine Achievement”,12 at the beginning of December 1933, on board a small trade vessel sailing from London to the Hook of Holland; hoping to walk all the way across Europe to Istanbul/​Constantinople with a small backpack filled with some clothes, a notebook and a copy of the Oxford Book of Verse. The other one, the narrative persona of A Time of Gifts, a middle-​aged travel writer who over the four decades that have passed since his ‘Great Trudge’ has accumulated a wealth of experiences and erudition. In A Time of Gifts final success was achieved by Fermor not only thanks to his great care with the poetic, often nostalgic use of English—​the feature of the book that was most often discussed by reviewers—​but also thanks to 11 Ibid., 50. 12 Robert Byron wrote enthusiastically about Byzantine art in his book The Byzantine Achievement (1929), and his travel book The Station (1928), about his visit to the art treasures of the monasteries of the Holy Mountain of Athos.

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a very elaborate combination and intermingling of such disparate elements as sophisticated intertextuality and great concern for a harmonious union between the text proper and the various paratexts and intertexts.13 Poetry as an intertext (and a metatext) joining the two ‘parallaxed’ aspects of Fermor, aged eighteen and forty-​nine, is given a crucial role, starting from the three carefully selected epigraphs-​paratexts opening the book. One, as mentioned before, comes from the poem by Louis MacNeice, “Twelfth Night”. One comes from the metaphysical poet George Herbert and reads: “I struck the board and cry’d ‘No more/​I will abroad.’/​What, shall I ever sigh and pine?/​My life and lines are free; free as the road, Loose as the wind”. And one is given in the Latin original and comes from a poem by Titus Petronius Arbiter: Linque tuas sedes alienaque litora quaere, o iuvenis: major rerum tibi nascitu ordo. Ne succumbe malis: te novelis ultimus Hister, Te Boreas geldius securague regna Canopi, quique ranascentem Phoebum cernuntque cadentem major in externas fit qui descendit harenas.14 Similarly to the two English epigraphs, it is carefully selected, both for its poetic power and appropriateness for the parallax metaphor employed in A Time of Gifts. In Petronius’s poem the young Fermor of 1933 (“o juvenis”) is directly asked (by an experienced poet) to embark on a journey to the “ultimus Hister”, that is the far-​off Danube (the Latin name for the Danube was the Hister), with the promise that “a greater succession of events” (“major rerum”) will happen on the way. And, in fact, by the end of A Time of Gifts, young Fermor is described as he reaches Esztergom, an ancient Hungarian town on the Danube. At a crucial moment the narrative personae’s expertise in poetry ancient and modern, with the love of poetry of the young Fermor—​aged eighteen, carefully described at the beginning with just one crucial book, the Oxford Book of Verse in his rucksack—​are allowed to merge within the aspect of the persona (only rarely alluded to in A Time of Gifts) as a war-​hero, thus ‘enlarging’ the parallax to three, rather than two perspectives. This happens when the narrative persona describes the poets and poems which influenced his younger alter ego. As 13 14

On the importance of paratexts in A Time of Gifts, see Moroz “Travel Books, Nostalgia and Paratexts”, in Spectrum of Emotions: From Love to Grief, ed. Wojciech Drąg and Ewa Kłębowska-​Ławniczak, Frankfurt am Mein, 159–​168. Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube. New York, 2005, 3.

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he moves on to Roman poetry he mentions Lucan, Catullus, Virgil and Horace, and adds that he taught himself “a number of the Odes” by Horace “and translated a few of them into awkward English sapphics and alcaics. Apart from their other charms, they were infallible mood-​changers”.15 And it is at this very moment that Fermor opens the parenthesis to tell this crucial story, adding this third, war-​time, perspective: One of them [odes]—​I.  ix. Ad Thaliarchum—​came to my rescue in strange circumstances a few years later. The hazards of war landed me among the crags of occupied Crete with a band of Cretan guerrillas and a captive German general whom we had waylaid and carried off into the mountains three days before. The German garrison of the island were in hot, but luckily temporarily misdirected, chase. It was a time of anxiety and danger: and for our captive, of hardship and distress. During a lull in the pursuit, we woke among the rocks just as a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida. We had been toiling over it, through snow and then rain, for the last two days. Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-​crest, the general murmured to himself: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte… (See how the deep snow shines on Mount Soracte!) It was one of the ones I  knew! I  continued from where he had broken off: … nec jam sustineat onus Silvae laborantes geluque Flumina constiterint acuto, (The toiling woods can bear the load no longer, and the streams stand still in the sharp ice.) and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general’s blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-​top to mine—​and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. As though, for a long moment the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.16 It is difficult to assess to what extent this scene was constructed or re-​ constructed from Fermor’s war memories. Definitely, Patrick Leigh Fermor, with a group of Cretan partisans, abducted General Kreipe and took him across

15 Ibid., 85. 16 Ibid., 85-​86.

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the Cretan mountains to a little bay from which they were picked up by a motor-​boat and transported to Alexandria. Fermor and General Kreipe definitely met in a 1972 TV programme on the general’s abduction.17 One may hope that the fact of “drinking from the same fountain” was instrumental in arranging this re-​union. The exact moment of the mutual recitation of Ad Thaliarchum and details of the scenery may just as well be elements of a travel-​writer’s licencia poetica. After all, the travel book as a genre, according to Borm, is described as a genre of “non-​fiction dominant”,18 which means that although it is predominantly non-​fiction, non-​fictionality is only a “dominant”, not an absolute rule, and travel writers feel free to construct scenes and conversations with the focus not so much on re-​constructing the past from memories, as of constructing the dramatic, fictionalized versions of memories. And the quoted fragment describing the recitation of Horace’s ode, introduced parenthetically (in a seemingly casual, off-​hand manner) may be viewed, I  think, as a high point in Fermor’s application of the figure of parallax in travel writing. For reasons probably both literary and mental, the books on parallax and the ‘Great Trudge’ proved most difficult for Fermor to write. It took him almost a decade to complete the second book, Between the Woods and the Water (it was finally published only in 1986), and the third and final book was published only posthumously in 2013; it was edited by Fermor’s biographer Artemis Cooper and a friend of his, the renowned travel writer Colin Thubron, for although Fermor had been working on it on and off for the last two decades of his life, it still had to be extensively edited before final publication. While looking at three late travel books written by Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium, The Shadow of the Sun, and Travels with Herodotus I would like to continue to rely on this powerful metaphor of parallax, used to present Fermor’s trilogy of the ‘Great Trudge’, and which can also be detected in Kapuściński’s late work; to look both into the differences as well as the similarities between these key travel narratives of the two writers. Polish and Anglophone travel writing had been developing in clearly different ways in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the Anglophone tradition, the genre of the travel book, after a dynamic start in the eighteenth century, was developing steadily and, for all the changes and innovations, becoming more and more established as a genre, clearly differentiated from such (equally dynamically) evolving genres as the novel, autobiography, and the guide-​book. This tradition was well known to Patrick Leigh Fermor, and he had fruitfully employed it in his earlier travel 17 Nico Mastorakis, The Abduction of General Kreipe, https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=vN1qrghgCqI, 1972, last accessed 11.03.2019. 18 Borm, “Defining travel”, 17.

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books: The Traveller’s Tree, Mani and Roumeli. Fermor’s trilogy was innovative in the sense of foregrounding the parallax metaphor, but both in its form and content it was firmly entrenched in the long established tradition of the Anglophone travel book. Conversely, in Polish literary tradition the genre of the podróż, also established in the eighteenth century, disappeared, slowly petering out in the course of the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, being dynamically replaced first by such ‘journalistic forms’ as listy z podróży and kartki z podróży, and later by reportaż podróżniczy. It might be argued that this ‘generic shift’ was the result of the relative weakness of the book market (especially in comparison with British and American markets) and the growing popularity of periodicals, magazines and daily newspapers, in which Polish writers began to publish their travel accounts (often in serialized form). As I argued in “Ryszard Kapuściński: Between Polish and Anglophone Travel Writing”, Kapuściński’s early books, in which he narrated his travels, all the way from Czarne gwiazdy (Black Stars) (1963) to Wojna futbolowa (The Soccer War) (1978), were reportaże podróżnicze in the strict sense of the term, relying on the tradition of reporting travel that was introduced into Polish literature by such writers as Stanisław Rejmont and developed by such established ‘masters’ of the genre as Ksawery Pruszyński and Melchior Wańkowicz in the period between the wars.19 In the 1930s, despite the opposition a positive assessment of the ‘literature of facts’ and ‘reportage’ by such eminent conservative critics as Karol Irzykowski, travel reportage quickly became very popular (both with readers and with some critics) and journalists and writers such as Melchior Wańkowicz and Ksawery Pruszyński and Zbigniew Uniłowski, became its stars. Wańkowicz’s oeuvre consisted of various forms of reportage, some of which like Szczenięce lata (The Puppy Years) (1935), focused on his personal reminiscences; some were war reportage. In the period before the World War ii he wrote three books of travel reportages: W kościołach Meksyku (In the Churches of Mexico) (1927), Opierzona rewolucja (The Fledgling Revolution) (1934) and Na tropach Smętka (On the Trails of Smętek) (1936). In the first two he reported on his visits to Mexico and the Soviet Union respectively, while in the third, Na tropach Smętka, he represented his wanderings undertaken in June 1935 (with his teenage daughter Marta) in the then German province of Ostpreussen, just north of the Polish border. It was this book which, with its flamboyant collage of journalistic and writerly methods, quickly became regarded as a ‘model’ of 19

Moroz, “Ryszard Kapuściński: Between Polish and Anglophone Travel Writing”, 169–​183.

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the reportaż podróżniczy. In Na tropach Smętka Wańkowicz mixed mostly humorous descriptions of his kayaking trip in the Masurian Lake District with mostly serious descriptions of a car trip around the region to visit Poles living there and with thoroughly serious essays describing the complex history of the region as well as its turbulent present (in both sociological and economic perspectives). It is the mixture of journalistic and novelistic tools applied skilfully with the narrator’s wit plus the rich, idiosyncratic language, at times archaic and at times modernist—​the language filled with neologisms (quite a few of which were to enter standard Polish), as well as Wańkowicz’s fervent patriotism, which resulted in the book’s popularity (nine editions in the period 1936–​ 1939) and the (generally) high assessment of it by his fellow writers and critics. The change of perspective, from the very general to the very personal, so central to Wańkowicz’s reportages in general and of Na tropach Smętka in particular, may be exemplified by the two final chapters of this book. The penultimate chapter is entitled “Tannenbergdenkmal”, while the final one is called “Zjazd” (“The Return”). Tannenberg-​Denkmal was a huge mausoleum built by the Germans in 1924–​1927 to commemorate the victory of German forces (led by field marshal Paul von Hindenburg) over the Russians (led by general Alexander Samsonov) in the huge battle which lasted from 23 August to 31 August 1914. In his chapter the title of which is the German name of this mausoleum, Wańkowicz’s visit there in the summer of 1935 turns into a synecdoche of the history of the whole region. The narrator explains that the operation which von Hindenburg masterminded extended over more than one hundred kilometres, but that this particular spot, called Tannenburg, was selected (by von Hindenburg himself) to give the battle its name—​for the very symbolic and specific reason of wiping out the memories of another battle fought there more than five centuries earlier.20 The huge mausoleum, which the narrator visited along with numerous school trips from all over the country, became for Germans the symbol of their ‘final’ defeat of the Slavs. Wańkowicz vividly retells the contexts and factsheets of the two battles, the 1410 one from the perspective of Polish historians, and the 1914 one through the information provided by a German

20

Melchior, Wańkowicz, Na tropach Smętka, Warszawa, 1974, 328. In German historiography the huge medieval battle which took place on 15 July 1410, in which the Teutonic Knights were defeated by Polish and Lithuanian forces led by the Polish King Władysław Jagiełło, is known as ‘The Battle of Tannenberg’ (Schlacht bei Tannenberg); (footnote: Poles call it ‘bitwa pod Grunwaldem’ (‘the battle of Grunwald’) using the name of a different village, next to which Polish troops were located. For Lithuanians it is the ‘the battle of Zalgris’, the word ‘zalgris’ meaning ‘the green forest’ (grunwald).

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guide to the mausoleum explaining the changing situation represented on a huge, high-​tech ‘plastic map’ of the battlefield with each of the numerous red and white electric bulbs (connected with sixty kilometres of electric wires) representing three thousands of soldiers. For Wańkowicz’s narrator the Hindenburg mausoleum, was not, as it was for its German architects and guides, the symbol of the end of history, but just one episode in “the epic conflict”.21 And he was, of course, right: ten years after Wańkowicz’s visit the huge mausoleum was no more, destroyed by the retreating Wehrmacht forces and the new victor, Stalin, gave the southern part of East Prussia to Poland, together with the former battlefield known alternatively as Grunwald, Tannenberg, or Zalgris. In the final chapter Wańkowicz returns to his foldable kayak and with wit and humour retells his and his daughter’s trip from the town of Pisz, then in the province of East Prussia, down the river Pissa to the Polish border and then down the rivers Narew and Vistula to Warsaw, thus ending his multi-​faceted book in a manner quite reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson’s kayaking trip down the rivers and canals in northern France and Belgium, described in The Inland Voyage. Ksawery Pruszyński (born 1907) was fifteen years younger than Wańkowicz, but came from a similar background: from a landowing (szlachta) family from Poland’s eastern borderlands. He studied law at Jagiellonian University in Cracow and began his career as a journalist and a reporter in the city’s conservative newspaper Czas in the late 1920s. His first travel reportages, the result of his trips to Hungary, were published there. During the 1930s he travelled extensively over Poland and Europe; also to Palestine and the U.S.A, and published his travel (and other) reportages regularly in both conservative and liberal newspapers. In 1937 he published two books of travel reportages which consolidated his reputation as a political journalist and a travel writer: Podróże po Polsce (Travels around Poland) and W czerwonej Hiszpanii (In Red Spain). The latter was composed of articles, notes, and essays which he wrote during his six-​months stay in the Republican Spain. What distinguishes W czerwonej Hiszpanii from numerous other travel accounts from the Spanish Civil War is the fact that Pruszyński tried really hard to remain ‘objective’ and present arguments of both sides of the conflict. Ultimately, his book focuses on the suffering of individuals and the cruelties meted out by both sides. In the conclusion Pruszyński exemplifies to his Polish reader how this spiral of civil war hatred grows out of social injuctices by recalling episodes with Azja Tuchajbejowicz 21 Ibid., 331.

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and the Nowowiejski family from a novel belonging to the centre of Polish literary canon, Henryk Sienkiewicz’s historical novel Pan Wołodyjowski, a novel usually read as presenting Poland’s past military glory, rather than its civil violence.22 Pruszyński’s travel reportage differs considerably from Wańkowicz’s in their lack of focus on the persona of the narrator and the focalization on different points of view and ways of life of the people encountered. Wańkowicz’s and Pruszyński’s travel reportages, for all the difference between them, are now considered to be canonical from the perspective of the developments of Polish literature in general and Polish travel writing in particular. And it is from this perspective that two travel reportages written by Zbigniew Uniłowski—​Żyto w dżungli (Rye in the Jungle, 1936) and Pamiętnik morski (Diary of a Sea Voyager, 1937)—​are regarded as relying on a deconstruction of the methods used by Wańkowicz and Pruszyński. According to Jan Zdunik: Uniłowski, in his texts, brought about the deconstruction of the model of travel reportage. This would not have been possible, if there had not existed a universally accepted model of non-​fictional prose.23 Jerzy Jarzębski confirmed that Uniłowski’s Żyto w dżungli “is especially interesting, for it violates the conventions of reportage, which is usually expected to be generous towards one’s fellow countrymen as they familiarize themselves with strange foreign places”.24 Other features of Żyto w dżungli which go against the grain of ‘canonical’ travel reportages are: ‘debunking’ of the jungle, prolonged descriptions of the inner life of the narrative persona and the predominance of such emotions—​connected with travelling in the tropics—​as boredom and ennui. Uniłowski was himself half-​mockingly musing that: In general I have recollected descriptions of journeys of our and foreign travellers, and I am instantly struck by a meagre thought, that I am after

22 23

24

Ksawery Pruszyński, W czerwonej Hiszpanii,Warszawa 1997, 414–​415. Jan Zdunik, “Reportaż w stanie dekonstrukcji: O Życie w dżungli Zbigniewa Uniłowskiego”, Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-​Skłodowska, vol. xxxiii, 2015, 266. “Uniłowski doprowadził bowiem w swoich tekstach do dekonstrukcji modelu reportażu podróżniczego. Działanie to nie byłoby z pewnością możliwe, gdyby nie istniał powszechnie uznany model prozy niefikcjonalnej”. Jerzy Jarzębski, “Interwar Prose” in Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918, ed. Tamara Trojanowska, Joanna Niżyńska and Przemysław Czapliński, Toronto, 2018, 345.

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all a writer of more important things than silly journeys, that I am metropolitan and a “psychologist”.25 Uniłowski’s travel reportages, because of their originality sparked off a heated debate about the nature and borders of this genre which rambled on in the Polish press in the years leading to World War ii.26 The ‘orthodox’ models of reportaż podróżniczy by Wańkowicz or Pruszyński, as well as the less orthodox one by Uniłowski formed the tradition that was important for Ryszard Kapuściński, when he embarked on his career as a travelling reporter in the 1950s. In 2005 Kapuściński, then a world famous writer and reporter, rumoured to be a candidate for the Nobel Prize, admitted the influence of Wańkowicz and Pruszyński on his own texts and called them his “literary masters”.27 The two books which marked a shift for Kapuściński from the journalistic, dry style of the reportaż podróżniczy in the direction of a more ‘literary’ approach were Cesarz (The Emperor) (1978) and Szakinszach (The Shah of Shahs) (1982). As Kapuściński himself admitted, these changes were partly the result of him, as a writer, being influenced by the theoretical and practical achievements of American New Journalism, which he understood as “the description of events through the application of literary tropes”.28 In August 1980, Kapuściński, who had witnessed and reported on more than twenty revolutions in Third World countries, was sent by Kazimierz Barcikowski, a friend of his and a Polish Communist Party Politburo member, to report on the strike in Gdańsk shipyard. Kapuściński sided with the striking workers and the nascent Solidarity movement. After the Communists fought back and declared Martial Law on 13 December 1981, Kapuściński lost his job as a pap correspondent, and Kultura, the weekly he had been writing for regularly, was closed for its pro-​Solidarity stance. Kapuściński was given a new, unexpected lease of life when the English translation of The Emperor was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich at the beginning of 1983. It received very favourable reviews in America from such influential reviewers as John Updike in The New Yorker and Peter Prescott in the Newsweek. In the British Sunday Times 25

26 27 28

Zbigniew Uniłowski, Żyto w dżungli, Pamiętnik morski, Reportaże, afterword Bolesław Faron, Kraków, 2001, 8.  “W ogóle przypominam sobie opisy podróżników naszych i obcych, zaraz też przenika mnie marna myśl, że ja jestem przecież taki pisarz od spraw istotniejszych niż głupie podróże, i że w ogóle miejski i ‘psycholog’ ”. See Bolesław Faron, “Posłowie” in Zbigniew Uniłowski, Żyto w dżungli, 389–​394. Bartosz Marzec, “Zaryzykuj Wszystko”, Rzeczpospolita, 10.08.2005 (236), 7. Quoted in Beata Nowacka and Zygmunt Ziątek. 2008. Ryszard Kapuściński:  Biografia Pisarza, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2008, 182, “opis wydarzenia przy użyciu literackich środków wyrazu”.

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Salman Rushdie named The Emperor his book of the year for 1983, and pronounced that Kapuściński’s writing: always wonderfully concrete and observant, conjures marvels of meanings out of minutiae. And his book transcends reportage, becoming a nightmare of power depicted as a refusal of history that reads as if Italo Calvino had re-​written Machiavelli.29 Such reviews meant that Kapuściński started to be regarded as a pundit on Third World issues and a guru of reportage. He was invited to international conferences, writers’ as well as journalists’ congresses, and as a university lecturer. Wiktor Osiatyński, a friend of Kapuściński’s, recalled that: he put a lot of work and effort into his new ‘life of a famous writer’. In the course of six months he polished up his English so that he could comfortably give interviews and take part in conferences and meetings with readers without needing an interpreter […] He had his teeth done […] He changed his reporter’s working outfit for a jacket, and sometimes he even put on a tie.30 When Kapuściński returned to travel writing at the end of the 1980s, he was a writer and not a reporter, and he was to rely on the ‘parallax effect’ in all of his three final books: Imperium, The Shadow of the Sun and Travels with Herodotus. In all three books the experienced narrative persona recalls journeys undertaken over many decades, and the hiatus (parallax) created by the erudite narrator and the apprentice traveller described in the opening chapters of these books is an important rhetorical point. In all three narratives the narrative persona of an experienced traveller, pundit, and commentator is foregrounded. Therefore, I would like to disagree with Casey Blanton, who labelled Kapuściński’s late travel narratives (from The Emperor to Travels with Herodotus) ‘polyphonic travels’. Blanton stated that: Kapuściński’s rhetorical choice of self-​effacing and polyphonic dialogues to represent a foreign culture produces a kind of narrative that can offer as its subject matter both the fragility and the power of self/​other relations. Kapuściński’s strategy is to relinquish the authoritative narrative 29 30

Salman Rushdie, “Christmas Books”, Sunday Times, 11 December 1983, 39. Artur Domosławski, Ryszard Kapuściński:  A Life, transl, Antonia Lloyd-​Jones. London: Verso, 2012, 292.

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vantage point traditionally occupied by a Western traveler and to offer, instead of one’s narration as the dominant voice, a polyphonic group of other voices in a dialogue with the narrator.31 I believe that the term ‘polyphonic’ renders the narrative of The Emperor and The Shah of Shahs very accurately. However, I would not call these narratives ‘travels’ because there is almost no ‘travelling’ described in these books, and the narrator in both of them is a ‘reporter’, not a ‘traveller’. Moreover, in my opinion, in Imperium, The Shadow of the Sun, and Travels with Herodotus Kapuściński’s narrative persona becomes exactly a type of “dominant voice”, a voice that subordinates all the other voices. It is also true that Kapuściński distances himself from “the Western traveller”. He constructs his persona as a traveller from Poland, a country which was not involved in colonial expansion and which was under Russian (and German) occupation, therefore his persona is equipped with more empathy (than the standard “Western traveler”). But Kapuściński’s own dominant voice particularly in his three final books makes their polyphonic nature very problematic. ‘The parallax effect’ is central in Imperium, where it is extended from the first chapter, entitled “Pińsk 39”, to the final paratext of an appendix entitled “Książki cytowane w ‘Imperium” (Books quoted in Imperium). This appendix was for some reason not translated or placed in the English 1994 translation by Klara Glawczewska. It includes sixty books in Polish, Russian, French and English; works of fiction and non-​fiction; on Russia and the Soviet Union, on history, philosophy, sociology and literature. It is not a typical academic type of bibliography, for although it is alphabetical in order as such lists are, the quotes in the text itself are not described in any academic fashion. This appendix shows the depth and breadth of Kapuściński’s readings and his expertise as a Sovietologist, and can be seen as functioning in grave contrast (parallax) with the scene in the first chapter when Kapuściński describes how in the autumn of 1939 his hometown of Pińsk (now in Belorussia) was invaded by the Red Army, annexed to the Soviet Union, and where Kapuściński as a boy of seven went to school, where Russian was the language of instruction and the only book in class was Stalin’s Voprosy Leninizma (Questions of Leninism).32 Of the three last Kapuściński’s travel narratives, the parallax in The Shadow of the Sun is the least obvious. However, this rhetorical trope is still there; four decades of Kapuściński’s travels in Africa are described, starting in 1958 31 Casey Blanton, “Ryszard Kapuściński’s Polyphonic Travels”, in Travel, Discovery, Transformation, ed. Gabriel R. Ricci, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 299. 32 Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium, transl. Klara Glowczewska, London, 1998, 4.

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in Ghana, all the way to the persona’s latest visit to the continent at the end of the twentieth century. In Travels with Herodotus, Kapuściński’s final book—​ his summa as a traveller and writer—​the parallax is extremely important. The book opens in the following way: Before Herodotus sets out on his travels ascending rocky paths, sailing a ship over the seas, riding through the wilds of Asia; before he happens on mistrustful Scytians, discovers the wonders of Babylon, and plumbs the mysteries of the Nile; before he experiences a hundred different places and sees a thousand inconceivable things, he will appear for a moment in a lecture on ancient Greece, which Professor Bieżuńska-​Małowist delivers twice weekly to the first-​year students in Warsaw University’s department of history. He will appear and just as quickly vanish. He will disappear so completely that now, years later, when I  look through my notes from those classes, I do not find his name. There are Aeschylus and Pericles, Sappho and Socrates, Heraclitus and Plato, but no Herodotus. And yet we took such careful notes. They were our only sources of information. The war had ended six years earlier and the city lay in ruins. Libraries had gone up in flames, we had no textbooks, no books at all to speak of. The professor has a calm, soft, even voice. Her dark, attentive eyes regard us through thick lenses with marked curiosity. Sitting at a high lectern, she has before her a hundred young people, the majority of whom have no idea that Solon was great, do not know the cause of Antigone’s despair, and could not explain how Themistocles lured the Persians into a trap. If truth be told, we didn’t even quite know where Greece was or, for that matter, that a contemporary country by that name had a past remarkable and extraordinary as to merit studying at university. We were children of war. High schools were closed during the war years, and although in the larger cities clandestine classes were occasionally convened, here, in this lecture hall, sat mostly girls and boys from remote villages and small towns, ill read, undereducated. It was 1951, University admissions were granted without entrance examinations, family provenance mattering most—​in the communist state the children of workers and peasants had the best chance of getting in.33 33

Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus, transl. Klara Glowczewska, London, Penguin Books, 2007, 4–​5.

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As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, ‘parallax’ alludes to the difference in the perception of an object seen from two different angles. And that was the case with Fermor’s Between Woods and Water and The Broken Road, or Kapuściński’s Imperium and The Shadow of the Sun. But in Travels with Herodotus, as is also the case with A Time of Gifts, we have three, not two, angles. Apart from the narrative persona, experienced and skilful as a writer (opening his narrative with a series of anaphors “before … ”, mixing past present and future tenses), and apart from Kapuściński, aged nineteen, an undereducated student of history at Warsaw University diligently taking notes during the lecture on ancient Greece, we get a third angle:  that of Herodotus. Herodotus’s Histories, in Gérald Genette’s terms, serves as a ‘hypotext’ for Travels with Herodotus, which is a ‘hypertext’. And Herodotus, from the very beginning, is presented as a master traveller and a master story teller, telling his stories with compassion, empathy, wit, and skill. The copy of the Polish translation of The Histories given to Kapuściński the young reporter by his boss becomes a talisman, and its contents a yardstick with which to gauge the world. In the final chapter of Travels with Herodotus, entitled poetically “We Stand in Darkness, Surrounded by Light”, Kapuściński tells of his trip, a short one, from the Greek island of Kos to the town Kapuściński insists on calling ‘Halicarnassus’, although (as he is reminded by a local Turkish policeman) it is called ‘Bodrum’ now. Halicarnassus is the birth place of Herodotus, and the description of this little trip ‘in the footsteps of the master’ is used by Kapuściński to sum up his musings on the nature of travel and on the nature of writing. And in these musings Kapuściński’s narrative persona becomes skilfully and unobtrusively merged with that of Herodotus. The key features of Herodotus—​the man, the historian, and the story teller—​are also alluded to in the narrative persona. Both Herodotus and Kapuściński’s narrative personae are “insatiable, spongelike organisms, absorbing everything easily and just as easily parting with it”,34 unlike the great majority of ‘sedentary people’. They are nomads, incapable of staying in one place; they “must walk (or ride) elsewhere, further away”, “they do not grow attached to anything, do not put down deep roots”,35 and they are both men of peripheries, of Halicarnassus and Pińsk, respectively, little towns far from the centres of civilization; in fact places, at the borderlands of civilization, where religions, cultures, languages and races mix, breeding empathy and understanding.

34 Ibid., 267–​268. 35 Ibid., 268.

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Kapuściński’s figure of parallax in Travels with Herodotus could also be perceived in terms of hyperbole. For it seems that in reality the parallax/​hiatus he constructs between himself aged nineteen, and himself writing Travels with Herodotus was not as huge as he depicted it. In 1951 Kapuściński was not as undereducated as the opening passages quoted earlier suggest. His parents were not peasants or workers, but teachers. Although originally from the provincial town of Pińsk, the family moved to Warsaw in 1945. Ryszard Kapuściński had attended one of the best secondary schools in Warsaw—​gimnazjum imienia Stanisława Staszica, and in 1950 he had two poems published by Dziś i jutro, while another weekly called Odrodzenie recorded a debate on poetry held by students in which Kapuściński’s poem “Różowe jabłka” (“Pink Apples”) was compared with the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky and the canonical Polish pre-​war poets.36 Kapuściński’s fluency in English, acquired in the mid-​1980s, helped him not only during conferences and lectures, but also in his readings. In 1991 Kapuściński stated that although “the achievements of such writers as Bruce Chatwin, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux are obvious, they had little influence on me”.37 This statement was true in 1991, but this situation was to change when Kapuściński returned to travel writing and wrote the three books discussed here. In these three narratives the influence of the key contemporary Anglophone travel writers became apparent. What Kapuściński took from Chatwin, Naipaul and Theroux was the conviction that non-​fictional travel writing could be very literary in nature, and that one of the key aspects of such ‘literariness’ was an erudite narrative persona employing novelistic tools and relying on various shades of intertextuality. The narrative personae of Imperium, The Shadow of the Sun, and Travels with Herodotus are centres of focalization, poets and experts. To the best of my knowledge there is no evidence that Ryszard Kapuściński read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trilogy, and it seems that it was a mere coincidence that Kapuściński wrote his narratives in a manner similar to Fermor: the erudite narrative persona looks back at his younger, inexperienced self. Their narratives remain almost unique in non-​fictional, referential travel writing. They rely on the type of narration typical of memoirs, with their vantage point a ‘backward’ recollection of memories and not on the linear, chronological narration characteristic of journals, diaries, and the vast majority of non-​fictional travel writing. 36 37

Nowacka, Ziątek, Ryszard Kapuściński, 368. Ryszard Kapuściński, Lapidaria I-​III, Warszawa, 2008, 173, “Osiągnięcia takich autorów jak Bruce Chatwin, V.S. Naipaul czy Paul Theroux są oczywiste, ale oni mieli mały wpływ na mnie”.

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Yet, whereas, for all their originality all of Fermor’s books are firmly embedded within the travel book genre, Kapuściński’s three final books move beyond the narrowly conceived borders of the genre of the reportaż podróżniczy into a territory much more generically nebulous. Kapuściński himself considered his books to be innovative and unique attempts to combine journalism with literature. His Polish critics have had problems with how to label them, because of the problems of defining the borders of the reportaż podróżniczy, whereas for his Anglophone critics and publishers alike they are usually just ‘travel books’. However, there is one more generic aspect at the borderland of Polish literature and its Anglophone criticism which should be considered. Some scholars, critics and fellow journalists writing in English about Kapuściński have come up with the term ‘literary reportage’. Diana Kuprel, for example, while writing (in English) about Polish ‘literary reportage’ called it “pre-​eminently hybrid or borderland genre […]formed at the intersection of imaginative literature, journalism and the social sciences it borrows from, and negotiates among, all three”.38 She described, among others, the ‘literary reportages’ of Melchior Wańkowicz and Ryszard Kapuściński. On the other hand, Neil Ascherson39 used the term ‘literary reportage’ to defend Kapuściński against such critics as Artur Domosławski who questioned the non-​ fictional aspects of Kapuściński’s reportages; thus the modifying adjective ‘literary’ served first Kapuściński, and then Ascherson as the poetic licence to use conventions and tools of fiction within the range of a reportage. It should be borne in mind, however, that ‘literary reportage’ is a wider term than ‘travel reportage’ (reportaż podróżniczy), for there are numerous ‘literary reportages’ which have war or autobiographical themes as central and very little or no travel elements (such reportages are rare in Kapuściński’s oeuvre, but not, for example in Wańkowicz’s). There is another important issue connected with all Kapuściński’s books that has been brought into the ongoing debate on them both in the Anglophone and in the Polish literary and social context: the use of fiction which some critics consider to be excessive. This debate is made extremely fuzzy by the fact that the borderland genres between journalism and literary fiction are conceived of differently in Anglophone and Polish literary contexts. So, on the 38 39

Diana Kuprel, “Literary Reportage: Between and Beyond Art and Fact”, in History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe, Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries vol. 1, ed. Macel Cornis-​Pope and John Naubauer, Amsterdam, 2004, 380. Neil Ascherson, “Ryszard Kapuściński Was a Great Story-​Teller Not a Liar”, https://​www. theguardian.com/​books/​booksblog/​2010/​mar/​03/​ryszard-​kapuscinski-​story-​liar, 2010, last accessed 27.12.2019.

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one hand we have scholars and critics like Kapuściński’a biographer Artur Domosławski and John Ryle who focus on documenting Kapuściński’s extensive use of fiction in his supposedly non-​ficitonal books. The title of Domosławski’s biography in Polish is Ryszard Kapuściński: Non-​fiction, Antonia Lloyd-​Jones, its English translator, entitled it simply as Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life. What the English title misses is the implied accusation present in the Polish title in which the English phrase “non-​fiction” used in the extended title ironically refers to the ‘fictionality’ of Kapuściński’s own books. John Ryle in his paper on The Emperor and The Shadow of the Sun accused Kapuściński of fictionalizing Africa and of relying on the exaggerated style he labelled “tropical baroque”, accusing him of “literary colonialism” and “gonzo orientalism”.40 But other critics, such as Beata Nowacka, Zygmunt Ziątek, Lawrence Weschler and Neal Ascherson focus on the literary merits of Kapuściński’s books and generally accept the non-​fictional side of them as the poetic licence of a great “story-​teller”. Timothy Garton Ash in his review of Domosławski’s biography of Kapuściński stated that he placed himself in “the third school”, somewhere between Ryle and Domosławski on the one hand and Nowacka, Ziątek, Weschler and Ascherson, on the other. According to Ash “there is nonetheless a vitally important line, or frontier zone, that writers of non-​fiction should strive never to cross”.41 Looking from without, however, Ash’s perspective is not so much a ‘unique’ independent “third school”, but a mild version of the first one. For he was clearly critical of Kapuściński’s method when he wrote: “We all make mistakes. No one sees the whole picture or can be wholly objective. Everyone has a point of view. But if I say I saw that, then I saw that. It was not a different street at a different time or told to me by someone else over a drink at the hotel bar”.42 This complex situation may be seen as reflecting a much more general phenomenon. Loredana Polezzi persuasively argued—​using the example of Claudio Magris’s Danubio—​that the translation of travel narratives into different languages and cultures is usually connected with what translation studies scholars, following Lawrence Venuti, call ‘domestication’. So, Danubio, which in Italy was marketed as “an itinerary between novel and essay” (“un itinerario

40

John Ryle, “At Play in the Bush of Ghosts”, https://​johnryle.com/​?article=at-​play-​in-​the-​ bush-​of-​ghosts, 2001, as accessed 28.12.2019. 41 Timothy Garton Ash, “Bearing Witness is a Sacred Trust”, https://​www.theguardian.com/​ commentisfree/​2010/​mar/​10/​fiction-​non-​fiction kapuscinski, last accessed 27.04.2020. Michael Sabelli, “Richard Kapuściński’s Discourse on the Other:  Literary Reportage’s Perspective on Reality”, Otherness: Essays and Studies, 3:2, 2013, 1–​26. 42 Ash, Ibid.

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fra romanazo e saggio”),43 in the English translation (but also in the Czech and Spanish ones) became “clearly […] a travel book”.44 This seems to be part of a larger process which is not limited to travel writing but can be observed across all genres of literature (and culture) with their changing horizons of expectations, their centrifugal and centripetal forces operating at the same time. While publishers, librarians and booksellers alike (and usually scholars too) prefer neat taxonomies, distinct and straightforward labels, artists instead prefer to perceive themselves as original, unique, and transcending previously constructed taxonomical borders. Bruce Chatwin was convinced that he had transcended the borders of the travel book while writing In Patagonia and Songlines. Kapuściński, a great admirer of Chatwin,45 was convinced that he was treading “the barren field”46 between Literature and Journalism which he “cultivated” in Imperium and Travels with Herodotus. 43

Loredana Polezzi, Translating Travel, Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation, Aldershot, 2001, 184. 44 Ibid., 187. 45 The influence of Chatwin on Kapuściński was recently confirmed by Marek Kusiba, Kapuściński’s friend, and a fellow journalist who in the book entitled Ryszard Kapuściński z daleka i z bliska (Ryszard Kapuściński From a Long and Short Distance) published in 2018 recollects Kapuściński’s visit in his flat in Toronto on 1 December 1996. During this visit Kapuściński went to a bookshelf, took a copy of Chatwin’s In Patagonia and said that he liked Chatwin’s “mixing of genres”, that Chatwin’s book was “reportage, essay and a story all in one”. (97) “Mówi, że podoba mu się mieszanie gatunków u Chatwina, że czyta się jak powieść, że to co on robi, to nowy rodzaj pisarstwa: i reportaż, i esej, i opowiadanie”. 46 Ryszard Kapuściński, Lapidaria I-​III, Warszawa, 2008, 172. “A co jest pomiędzy? W dużym stopniu puste pole, które próbuję uprawiać”.

­c hapter 6

Belated Grand Tourists: Aldous Huxley and Jarosław Iwaszkiewcz Although in the twentieth century the tradition of the Grand Tour seemed to be spent, there were some writers who visited the cultural centres of Europe, with their sights, operas, theatres and museums, and went on to describe them in their travel narratives. Obviously, they had to cope not only with the huge tradition of European High Culture, but also with the almost as huge tradition of writing about this High Culture. Lisa Colletta stated in the introduction to the book of essays The Legacy of the Grand Tour: New Essays on Travel Literature and Culture (2015) that in her collection the term Grand Tour is used “in a rather deliberately vague way” because “the Grand Tour itself was actually a fairly vague construction”.1 Thanks, to a certain extent, to this vagueness, in the essays included in her volume there are quite a few twentieth-​century writers whose narratives of travel are analysed with the help of the tools provided by the notion of the Grand Tour: D.H. Lawrence, Lawrence Durrell, Elizabeth Gilbert and Anthony Powell.2 For this chapter I have selected two more twentieth-​century travel narratives to be analysed and compared in the context of the Grand Tour: Aldous Huxley’s Along the Road (1925) and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s Podróże do Włoch (Travels to Italy) (1977). They were published more than half a century apart, and there are many differences between them, but there also exist quite a few similarities which, I believe, are worth pondering. First of all, there are some striking biographical similarities between these two writers. Both Huxley and Iwaszkiewicz were born in 1894 in well-​to-​do families, very much concerned with the education of their children. Huxley went to Eton and then to Oxford University; Iwaszkiewicz studied law at Kiev University and also at the Musical Conservatory there. They both travelled extensively in Europe between the

1 Lisa Colletta, “Introduction” in The Legacy of the Grand Tour: New Essays on Travel Literature and Culture, ed. Lisa Coletta, Lanham, 2015, ix. 2 Judy Suh, “D.H. Lawrence’s Anti-​Tour of Fascist Italy: Sea and Sardinia and Etruscan Places” (93–​114), James Buzard, “Postcolonial Velediction: Durrell’s Bitter Lemons of Cyprus and the Legacies of the Grand Tour” (115–​132), Shannon Russell, “Consuming Italy:  From Goethe’s Italian Journey to Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love” (133–​154), Lisa Colletta, “Ripley’s Tour: The Grand Tour as Confidence Trick in The Talented Mr. Ripley”. (155–​168).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004429611_008

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wars, as ‘belated Grand Tourists’. They both became major writers of impressive and very varied oeuvres. They both wrote and published not only novels and short stories, but also poems, plays and numerous non-​fictional texts: essays, reviews and numerous travel narratives. They were both very well versed not only in the tradition of classical literature, European literatures, and their own national literatures, but they were also both ardent and proficient musical critics, as well as enthusiasts, admirers and avid ‘popularisers’ of painting, sculpture and architecture. Huxley’s Along the Road was written and published in the mid-​1920s. Huxley was then in his early thirties, and the financial success of his early, ‘satirical novels’ Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923), allowed him to move to Italy, to settle down near Florence, and to travel intensively (mostly by car) not only in Italy, but also in France, Germany, Austria, Belgium and Spain. These trips later became material for notes, articles and essays which were published first in different periodicals and later gathered in the volume entitled Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist. Podróże do Włoch, though, was written when Iwaszkiewicz was in his eighties, and the book became, in many ways, his travelling and artistic summa. He started writing it in 1975, when he was 81, and it was published two years later. Iwaszkiewicz opened the introductory part entitled “Do czytelnika” (To the Reader) with the following summary: If I were to believe my notes in guide-​books and Baedekers, I have been to Rome some thirty times, in Italy but not in Rome six times, and thirteen times in Sicily. These journeys have been spread over more than half century.3 To extend the Huxley-​Iwaszkiewicz parallel in the travelling direction, it could be stated that they both went to Italy for the first time a few years after the Great War, in the early 1920s, as young, promising and successful writers eager to visit the sights and museums and enjoy the climate, and then they both kept returning to Italy more or less regularly throughout their lives. In this chapter I am going to explore the different ways in which they relied in their Italian travel narratives on the notion of the Grand Tour. Huxley, as we will see, relied to a large extent on a strategy which might be called the ‘anti-​Grand Tour’,

3 Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Podróże do Włoch, Warszawa, 1977, 9, “Jeśli mam wierzyć zapisom moim w przewodnikach i bedekerach, to byłem w Rzymie coś trzydzieści razy, we Włoszech bez Rzymu sześć razy i trzynaście razy na Sycylii. Te podróże rozciągnęły się na przestrzeni przeszło pół wieku”.

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while Iwaszkiewicz used the convention which might be called the ‘sentimental Grand Tour classic narrative’. 1

Aldous Huxley’s Along the Road as a Travel Book

Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist is a title, in more than one way not typical for Huxley. For it is not a ‘serious’ quotation like Brave New World or Time Must Have a Stop or After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Or like the title of Huxley’s two later travel books: Beyond the Mexique Bay and Jesting Pilate. It does not bear the title of one of the essays, as Music at Night or The Olive Tree and Other Essays. It is built around the understatements of three phrases: “along the road”, “notes” and “a tourist”. And, perhaps a bit disappointingly, in these notes and essays Huxley does not even approach the difference between ‘notes’ and ‘essays’ or ‘tourists’ as opposed to ‘travellers’. Yet Along the Road is a strong anti-​tourist statement. In the chapter devoted to travel narratives in the nineteenth century, the concept of anti-​tourist narratives in Anglophone tradition, so aptly described by James Buzard, was traced back to William Beckford’s Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, and Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; this attitude was ‘utilized’ in the second half of the nineteenth century in such diverse travel books as Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad and Samuel Butler’s Alps and Sanctuaries. Although most of the anti-​tourist strategies Huxley displayed in Along the Road can be traced back to the Romantic and Victorian travel narratives of Lord Byron, Samuel Rogers, William Hazlitt or Samuel Butler, the whole mixture is clearly unique—​‘Huxleyan’. In the following sections three distinct categories of ‘anti-​tourist’ strategies deployed by Huxley in Along the Road will be analysed separately, even though in Huxley’s travel book they are often intertwined. Firstly, Huxley’s direct attack on the ‘vulgarity’ of tourists in the “Why Not Stay at Home” essay will be discussed. Secondly, his attack on the ‘artefacts’ of the ‘Tourist Industry’, such as tourist guide-​books, will be dealt with, and thirdly we will approach Huxley’s own art criticism, showing the depth and width of his knowledge about art, and his predilection for personal, idiosyncratic judgements. Huxley’s direct anti-​tourist attack on ‘tourists’ and their motives comes in the first essay of Along the Road, entitled “Why Not Stay at Home?”, and its echoes reverberate throughout the volume in a point-​counter-​point manner. The only non-​orthodox aspect of Huxley’s anti-​tourist attack is the terminology: for Huxley, in “Why Not Stay at Home”, avoids using the ‘traveller versus tourist’ dichotomy—​which was the norm—​and insists on using the words

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‘tourist’ and ‘traveller’ as synonyms; his binary opposition is made between ‘traveller’ and ‘genuine traveller’. Alternatively, and somewhat confusingly, ‘genuine travellers’ are also referred to in this essay as ‘travellers born’ and ‘travellers-​for-​travelling sake’. Of such “travellers”, who in standard anti-​tourist discourse are referred to as ‘tourists’, he writes: We call such people travellers because they do not stay at home. But they are not genuine travellers, not travellers born. For they travel not for travelling’s sake, but for convention’s. They set out, nourished on fables and fantastical hopes, to return, whether they avow it or not, disappointed. Their interest in the real and actual being insufficiently lively, they hanker after mythology, and the facts, however curious, beautiful and varied, are a disillusionment. It is only the society of their fellow-​tourists, with whom they conspire, every now and then, to make a little oasis of home in the foreign wilderness, coupled with the consciousness of a social duty done, that keeps them even moderately cheerful in the face of the depressing facts of travel.4 The “genuine traveller”, on the other hand: is so much interested in real things that he does not find it necessary to believe in fables. He is insatiably curious, he loves what is unfamiliar for the sake of its unfamiliarity, he takes pleasure in every manifestation of beauty […]5 Huxley expands his argument by stating, tongue in cheek, that “[f]‌or the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices it is imperious, demanding its victim’s time, money, energy and the sacrifice of his comfort”.6 And in the second part of “Why Not Stay at Home” travelling as a vice is compared, in a frivolous way, to reading as a vice: “like all other vicious men, the reader and the traveller have a whole armoury of justifications with which to defend themselves”.7 This flippant essay, describing different types of travellers in a detached, third person, objective narration, shifts rapidly in the final paragraph to a subjective, personal statement of Huxley’s persona: With me, travelling is frankly a vice. The temptation to indulge in it is one which I  find almost as hard to resist as the temptation to read 4 Aldous Huxley, Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist, New York, 1989, 15–​16. 5 Ibid., 16. 6 Ibid., 17. 7 Ibid., 18.

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promiscuously, omnivorously and without purpose. […] Deplorable weakness! I try to comfort myself with the hope that even my vices may be of some profit to me.8 Huxley’s “Why Not Stay at Home” is a fine example of anti-​tourist discourse, with its classical, anti-​tourist arguments. In the first part of his essay Huxley carefully distinguishes two different aspects of modern ‘cultural’ tourism, which clearly show its foundations in the Grand Tour as an ideological project with two ‘musts’: the refined manners of Paris, and the Arts (as epitomized by Florence, Rome and Venice). In the first part of his essay Huxley mocks modern tourists exactly along these two lines: “Gay Paree”9 and also Monte Carlo, which represent “Life”, while Florence and Rome represent “Art”:10 But Paris and Monte Carlo are not the only resorts of pilgrimages. There are also Rome and Florence. There are picture galleries, churches and ruins as well as shops and casinos. And the snobbery which decrees that one must like Art—​or, to be more accurate, that one should have visited the places where Art is to be seen—​is almost as tyrannous as that which bids one visit the places where one can see Life.11 The sights in France, Italy, Germany and other Western European countries which had been visited by the Grand Tourists of the eighteenth century were revisited by the ‘Mass Tourists’ of the Victorian period. And one of the hallmarks of this ‘Industry’ were travel guidebooks (then known as “Hand-​books for Travellers”). The first ‘modern’ guidebook, entitled A Hand-​book for the Travellers on the Continent, was published by John Murray in 1836. Murray’s handbooks, with their characteristic red covers and gold lettering, quickly became the epitome of this new, tourist age. By the end of the century, when they sold the business, they had produced over 400 titles and editions.12 In 1861 the first English edition of Karl Baedeker’s guidebook appeared on the British market, and ‘Baedekers’ would gradually overcome the John Murray guidebooks to the extent that the term a ‘Baedeker’ and not a ‘Murray’ started to be used in English generically to mean a ‘guidebook’. 8 Ibid., 19–​20. 9 Ibid., 11. 10 Ibid., 13. 11 Ibid., 13. 12 (http://​digital.nls.uk/​jma/​topics/​publishing/​handbooks.html), last accessed 28.05.2019.

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Guidebooks served occasionally as a suitable point of criticism and departure for Victorian, class-​oriented art critics and travel writers. For example, John Ruskin, in his famous Mornings in Florence (1875–​1877), constructed his narrative in the first chapter, entitled “The First Morning: San Croce” in opposition to the phrase “Your Murray’s Guide tells you […] but”13 or “Mr. Murray tells you […] but”.14 Ruskin’s own narration points out the errors and mistakes in Murray’s guidebooks and foregrounds his own erudition and expertise as an art critic. It is worth mentioning that Mornings in Florence is a sui generis guidebook, for although, unlike the Murrays or the Baedekers of this period, it did not provide information on hotels, restaurants and transport, it is a ‘cultural’ guide, leading the implied readers, ‘culture tourists’, through the key art sights of Florence on six ‘morning tours’. Huxley’s essay entitled “Guide-​Books” from Along the Road is a fine example of an anti-​tourist discourse with a camp twist. Huxley admits to have been using guide-​books regularly, and generally he was happy with them: How often have I cursed Baron Baedeker for sending me through the dust to see some nauseating Sodoma or drearily respectable Andrea del Sarto! How angry I have been with him for starring what is old merely because it is old! And how I have hated him for his lack of discrimination!15 It is perhaps to be expected that an essay on guide-​books, by someone disposed in such a strong anti-​tourist manner as Aldous Huxley was in the middle 1920s, should start with the following declaration: For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guide-​ book will be the one he himself has written. All others are an exasperation. They mark with asterisk the works of art which he finds dull, and they pass over in silence those which he admires.16 Along the Road, at least in its “Places” and “Works of Art” parts, is just such a personal guide-​book by Huxley, whereas in the “Guide-​books” essay Huxley not only exposes the comic aspect of those guide-​books he considers bad, but through his survey of old guide-​books raises the key issue which runs through 13

John Ruskin, Mornings in Florence:  Being Simple Studies of Christian Art for English Travellers, Orpington, 1875, 3 and 6. 14 Ibid., 10. 15 Ibid., 43. 16 Ibid., 43.

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all the essays: his critique of the lack of ‘historicism’ in contemporary, Modernist, art criticism. On the issue of guidebooks Huxley states (in a truly camp manner): “The only literary guides I enjoy are the really bad ones—​so bad that their badness makes, so to speak, a full circle and becomes something sublime”.17 Huxley’s examples which follow illustrate not so much Huxley’s persona’s erudition, but his ease with foreign languages. One of the examples about a “sixth-​rate Venus rising from the Sea”18 is in Italian; another, a description of Dijon, is in French, and there is also one in English: In any town it is always worth taking a look at the local guide. If you are lucky you will find one in which a train is called ‘Stevenson’s magic babe’.19 In “Guide-​Books” Huxley approaches the fundamental issue, one to which he later returns in “Breughel”; the issue that aesthetic and moral values are not universal. Huxley begins with the paradoxical statement: “An early Murray is a treasure. Indeed, any volume of European travels, however dull, is interesting, provided that it be written before the age of railways and Ruskin”.20 And then he proceeds with his main argument: It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the ӕsthetic prejudices of the period, the places you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space: you travel through time and thought as well. They are morally wholesome reading too, these old books of travel; for they make one realize the entirely accidental character of our tastes and our fundamental intellectual beliefs. It seems to us axiomatic, for example, that Giotto was a great artist; and yet Goethe, when he went to Assisi, did not even take the trouble to look at the frescoes in the church. For him, the only thing worth seeing at Assisi was the portico of the Roman temple.21 The importance of Huxley’s claim from this fragment “of the accidental character of our tastes and our fundamental intellectual beliefs” is dealt with later on in this chapter when his critique of Modernist art criticism is presented. 17 Ibid., 46. 18 Ibid., 47. 19 Ibid., 47. 20 Ibid., 48. 21 Ibid., 48–​49.

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At this point it is worth noting that in his “Guide-​books” essay Huxley was not a purist when dealing with travel literature in the generic sense, as he collapsed different travel writing genres in his argument and applied the term “guide-​book”, to travel books and to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In fact, the latter part of the “Guide-​books” essay is not on guide-​books in the sense of ‘Murrays’ or ‘Baedekers’ but on travel books and novels. Huxley describes his favourite readings ‘guiding’ him during his extensive Italian and French journeys: Stendhal, Balzac, Veuillot, Peter Young, Miss Berry, Lady Mary Montagu, “Bible-​selling Borrow”, William Beckford (“the perfect dilettante”) and Dr Charles Burney’s The Musical Tours in Europe.22 In the last part of his “Guide-​ books” Huxley gets distracted from the theme of guide-​books even more when he approaches the nature of changes that Italy had undergone from the eighteenth century. The topic of guidebooks returns in Along the Road later on in the essay “The Best Picture in the World”. Huxley’s ‘rôle distance’ from hordes of tourists in Europe, the hard core of his anti-​tourist strategy, is his expertise and erudition in all areas associated with so-​called High Culture: with Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts. In Along the Road this expertise is confirmed by the regularity with which Huxley challenges professional experts’ views and theories. Huxley’s critique of professional art critics in Along the Road is not concentrated in one specific, but is spread out throughout all essays in the parts entitled “The Works of Art”: “Breughel”, “Rimini and Alberti”, “Conxolus”, “The Best Picture”, “The Pieran Spring”, as well as throughout some essays from other parts, such as “Guide Books”, “The Palio at Siena” and “Views of Holland”. Huxley did not personalize his attack on contemporary professional art criticism, nor did he challenge specific theories and/​or their aspects; but the target of his attack must, nevertheless, have been clear to most implied readers. The fundamental doubt Huxley raises regularly in Along the Road about Modernist critics is their insistence on form and disregard of content. In one of the opening paragraphs of “Breughel” Huxley writes explicitly: “Fashion changes and the views of art with it. At the present time it is fashionable to believe in form to the exclusion of content”.23 The formalists’ bias is ridiculed as Huxley further develops his argument: The admirers of Giotto […] contrive to look at the master’s frescoes without considering what they represent or what the painter desired to express. Every germ of drama or meaning is disinfected out of them; only

22 Ibid., 52. 23 Ibid.,139.

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the composition is admired. The process is analogous to reading Latin verses without understanding them—​simply for the sake of the rhythmical rumbling of the hexameters.24 Huxley’s attack on the aesthetic extremism of formalists seems to be directed specifically at theories on the visual arts as promoted by two professional art critics, Roger Fry and Clive Bell, both of whom were prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group. Huxley used to meet all the members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, when he, after his graduation from Oxford, was living in Garsington Manor during the later stages of the Great War, and when the members of the Bloomsbury Group came regularly from London for weekends and for longer sojourns. Roger Fry was a co-​editor (1909–​1919) of The Burlington Magazine, the first scholarly periodical devoted to art history in Britain. He also organized the first Post-​Impressionist (it was in fact Fry who coined this term) exhibition at London’s Grafter Galleries. In a series of essays—​of which “An Essay in Aesthetics” (1910) is considered the most influential—​Fry promoted the idea that the formal properties of paintings are more crucial than the “associated ideas” conjured in the viewer by their representational content. Fry’s ideas inspired Clive Bell, a friend of his, to construct his theory of significant form. Bell formulated it in his book Art (1914): “to describe the idea that the form of an artwork or forms within an artwork can be expressive, even if largely or completely divorced from a recognizable ­reality”.25 Huxley’s own erudition as an art enthusiast (and amateur art critic) must have grown considerably as a result of meetings with the Bloomsbury theoreticians and practitioners of the visual arts such as Fry, Bell or the artists who remained on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Mark Gertler. It was not only in the essays published in Along the Road that Huxley challenged the formalist bias or the professional bias of the High Modernist critics such as Fry or Bell. He did so consistently throughout the 1920s and 1930s in his newspapers articles and essays (which were later gathered into such collections as On the Margin (1923), Proper Studies (1927), Do What You Will (1929) and Music at Night (1931)). In his fiction he poked fun and mocked their artistic poses and vanities; for example, in the portrayal of the character Gombauld in Crome Yellow (1921), who is thought to have been based on Mark Gettler,26 or Rodney Clegg from “Two or Three Graces” (1926), whose cynicism might, perhaps, 24 Ibid., 141. 25 http://​www.tate.org.uk/​art/​art-​terms/​s/​significant-​form, last accessed 29.05.2019. 26 Sarah MacDougall, Mark Gertler, London, 2002, 155.

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be attributed to any of the Bloomsbury painters. But the uniqueness of Huxley’s position in Along the Road extended far beyond the personal allusions to Bloomsbury artists. Huxley was able to transcend the limitations embedded in the ‘universalizing’ aesthetic theories grounded in Burke and Kant which lay at the basis of the theory of Bell’s ‘significant form’. It was Huxley’s erudition and perceptiveness that allowed him to challenge the radical formalist theories of the High Modernists. Having exposed the radical change of attitude to paintings which had taken place within the two generations between Landseer and Matisse, Huxley stated: These historical considerations should make us chary of believing too exclusively in any single theory of art. One kind of painting, one set of ideas are fashionable at any given moment. They are made the basis of a theory which condemns all other kinds of painting and all preceding critical theories. The process constantly repeats itself.27 In this period Huxley’s extensive reading led him to consider these “historical considerations”, not only in the area of the history of art, but history in general, and this, in turn, led to his “provisional acceptance of historicist relativism and the necessity for each epoch ‘to think its own thoughts’ ”.28 Huxley’s views on art depicted in Along the Road place him a long distance away from ‘liberal humanist’ criticism, with it ‘universal’ claims, which predominated at that period, and much closer to the ‘Theory’, or in other words, to many post-​modern theories which regard such notions as gender identity, the individual self, or the issue of art itself as fluid, unstable, socially constructed and contingent concepts, and not as solid essences. It would, perhaps, be difficult to disagree with George Woodcock that “Breughel” is “one of the best essays of Along the Road”,29 for it is very well-​written and well-​structured. The first, theoretical, part offers a lucid critique of the Modernist/​Formalist obsession with form and the exclusion of story, or ‘literature’. And in the second part Huxley argues convincingly why Pieter Breughel should be considered a major painter, and what had prevented this from ­happening:

27 Huxley, Along the Road, 140. 28 Robert S. Baker, The Dark Historic Page: Social Satire and Historicism in the Novels of Aldous Huxley, 1921–​1939, Madison, 1982, 9. 29 George Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour:  A Study of Aldous Huxley, Montreal, 2006, 89.

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There is one painter against whom, it seems to me, theoretical prejudice has always most unfairly told. I mean the elder Breughel. Looking at his best paintings I find that I can honestly answer in the affirmative all the questions which a critic may legitimately put himself. He is highly competent ӕsthetically; he has plenty to say; his mind is curious, interesting and powerful; and he has no false pretensions, is entirely honest. And yet he has never enjoyed the high reputation to which his merits entitle him. This is due, I think, to the fact that his work has never quite squared with any of the various critical theories which since his days have had a vogue in the ӕsthetic world. A subtle colourist, a sure and powerful draughtsman, and possessing powers of composition that enable him to marshal the innumerable figures with which his pictures are filled into pleasingly decorative groups (built up, as we see, when we try to analyse his methods of formal arrangement, out of individually flat, silhouette-​like shapes standing in a succession of receding planes) Breughel can boast of purely ӕsthetic merits that ought to endear him even to the strictest sect of the Pharisees. Coated with this pure ӕsthetic jam, the bitter pill of his literature might easily, one would suppose, be swallowed. If Giotto’s dalliance with sacred history be forgiven him, why may not Breughel be excused for being an anthropologist and a social philosopher? To which I  tentatively answer: Giotto is forgiven, because we have so utterly ceased to believe in Catholic Christianity that we can easily ignore the subject matter of his pictures and concentrate only on their formal qualities; Breughel, on the other hand, is unforgivable because he made comments on humanity that are still interesting to us. From his subject matter we cannot escape; it touches us too closely to be ignored. That is why Breughel is despised by all up-​to-​date Kunsterforschers. And even in the past, when there was no theoretical objection to the mingling of literature and painting, Breughel failed, for another reason, to get his due. He was considered low, gross, a mere comedian, and as such unworthy of serious consideration.30 Huxley is making judgments which he presents as personal, and therefore tentative, provisional, subjective, with phrases like: “it seems” and “I think”. But at the same time he lucidly describes Breughel’s merits as a painter: that he was both a master of “composition”, “form” and “ӕsthetic merits”; in other words a 30 Ibid., 147–​149.

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master of “painting”, but also of content and story; in other words a master of “literature”. And it is the latter which earns Breughel the positive label of “anthropologist and social philosopher”. The topography of museums containing Breughel’s best paintings reveals the extent of the Huxleys’ ‘Grand Tour’ travels in Europe after they had settled in Italy in 1923: Antwerp, Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Naples and Vienna. All three biographers of Aldous Huxley stress the extent of the travel undertaken by the Huxleys in the years 1923–​1925 (that is, in the period when the essays from Along the Road were written), after their settling down in Tuscany in 1923. Their own car (a 10hp Citroën) enabled them to travel freely and over long distances in Italy, France, Austria, Germany, Belgium and Spain. Most of these journeys were undertaken in the Grand Tour spirit of educational trips, but they also travelled a lot to St. Trond in Flanders, where Maria’s family lived. While traversing central Europe from northern Italy to St. Trond, they went through Vienna on several occasions and visited their galleries with Breughel’s masterpieces: In the Vienna galleries are collected more than a dozen of his pictures, all belonging to his last and best period. The Tower of Babel, the great Calvary, the Numbering of the People at Bethlehem, the two Winter Landscapes and the Autumn Landscape, the Conversion of Saint Paul, the Battle between the Israelites, the Marriage Feast and the Peasants’ Dance—​all these admirable works are here. It is on these that he must be judged.31 And when Huxley, finally, pronounces his judgements, he sticks to the division between “ӕsthetic merits” and “literature”. The former are enumerated using the example of Breughel’s landscapes. Huxley presents Breughel as a master of studies of snow and winter landscapes, and also reveals some features which he finds wanting: Breughel’s method is less fundamentally compatible with the snowless landscapes of January and November. The different planes stand apart a little too flatly and distinctly. It needs a softer, bloomier kind of painting to recapture the intimate quality of such scenes as those he portrays in these two pictures.32

31 Ibid., p. 150. 32 Ibid., 152.

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The final assessment of Breughel’s ‘mature’ landscapes comes from a clearly ‘mature’ art critic, confident with his tools:  they are “the most beautiful sixteenth-​century landscapes of which I  have any knowledge. They are intensely poetical, yet sober and not excessively picturesque or romantic. Those fearful crags and beetling precipices of which the older painters were so fond do not appear in these examples of Breughel’s maturest work”.33 Huxley valued Breughel highly for his realistic but moving representation of Flemish folk: He exhibits them mostly in those moments of orgiastic gaiety with which they temper the laborious monotony of their daily lives:  eating enormously, drinking, uncouthly dancing, indulging in that peculiarly Flemish scatological waggery.34 Huxley’s high praise for Breughel as a painter of Flemish folk seems to be connected with his thorough acquaintance with Flanders, acquired during the visits to his Flemish in-​laws. The shortest essay of Along the Road is entitled “Patinir’s River”, and it describes the landscapes along the second largest river of Flanders—​the Meuse. This poetic mini-​essay is a tribute both to the beauty of the Flemish countryside and the talent of Joachim Patinir, the Flemish Renaissance painter, inventor of the Weltendschaft (‘world landscape’) type of composition. This tribute to Patinir is paradoxically twisted; for Huxley describes how he has come to realize that Patnir was a master of re-​creation, not of creation. Looking at the Meuse landscape on a rainy day through the window of his little Citroën the narrative persona remarks: Crags, river, emerald green slopes, dark woods were there, indubitably real. I had given to Joachim Patinir the credit that was due to God. What I had taken for his exquisite invention was the real and actual Meuse.35 Subsequently, Huxley moves on to distinguish and praise two other types of Breughel’s paintings. On the one hand, the allegorical paintings: The Triumph of Death at the Prado is appalling in its elaboration and completeness. The fantastic ‘Dulle Griet’ at Antwerp is an almost equally elaborate triumph of evil.36 33 Ibid., 153. 34 Ibid., 153–​154. 35 Ibid., 88. 36 Ibid., 154.

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Of Breughel’s religious paintings Huxley selects “Christ carrying the Cross” to show, as I believe, not only Breughel’s but also his own ‘uniqueness of vision’. Huxley argues of Breughel’s Calvary that it “is the most suggestive and, dramatically, the most appalling”37 because it offers the change of perspective from all other Calvaries, where: Christ is the centre, the divine hero of the tragedy; this is the fact from which they start, it affects and transforms all other facts. Breughel, on the other hand, starts from the outside and works inwards. He represents the scene as it would have appeared to any casual spectator on the road to Golgotha on a certain spring morning in the year 33 A.D. Other artists have pretended to be angels, painting the scene with a knowledge of its significance.38 Huxley describes in detail the crowd of spectators in Breughel’s Calvary gathering to watch the execution, and it is this “sociological” rather than “religious” aspect of the painting that he foregrounds. And the unexpected comment of the narrative persona concerns the critique of “cranky humanitarianism” in Europe, which had led to a situation when “hangings take place in private”, which gives the chance to earn fortunes to “titled newspaper proprietors” who sell their “juicy descriptions” of executions “to a prodigiously much larger public”.39 It is difficult to assess the extent to which this re-​evaluation of Pieter Breughel and the fact that he is now generally considered one of the key/​crucial ‘Old Masters’ is due to non-​professional art critics and ‘art enthusiasts’ such as Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden (in his 1938 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”), or William Carlos Williams (Pictures from Breughel and Other Poems (1962). As far as professional art criticism goes, it was Fritz Grossmann’s Breughel: The Paintings (1955) that was the turning point, ever since which the status of Pieter Breughel the Elder as a major ‘Old Master’ has not been seriously challenged. Huxley’s assessment of another ‘Old Master’, Piero della Francesca, was not as revolutionary and innovative as that of Pieter Breughel, for Piero had been deemed a major Renaissance painter long before Huxley’s Along the Road, both by professional art critics and by amateurs. Huxley’s essay on the art of Piero is provocatively entitled “The Best Picture”—​a provocation because Huxley himself challenges the arbitrary nature of this expression:

37 Ibid., 155. 38 Ibid., 155–​156. 39 Ibid., 157.

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The expression is ludicrous, of course. Nothing is more futile than the occupation of those connoisseurs who spend their time compiling first and second elevens of the world’s best painters, eights and fours of musicians, fifteens of poets, all-​star troupes of architects and so on. Nothing is more futile because there are a great many kinds of merit and an infinite variety of human beings. Is Fra Angelico a better artist than Rubens? Such questions, you insist, are meaningless. It is all a matter of personal taste.40 At this moment Huxley starts to turn his argument around and states: And up to a point this is true. But there does exist, none the less, an absolute standard of artistic merit. And this is a standard which is in the last resort a moral one. Whether a work of art is good or bad depends entirely on the quality of the character which expresses itself in the work. Not that all virtuous men are good artists, nor all artists conventionally generous.41 Huxley’s argument may well be true, but it is very difficult to prove even for an essayist of Huxley’s skill and erudition. Huxley shows the moral integrity behind Piero Francesco’s “Resurrection”, a fresco he calls histrionically “The Best Picture” (in the world). Huxley praises Piero Francesco generally for “a natural, spontaneous and unpretentious grandeur”;42 he calls him “majestic, without being at all strained, theatrical or hysterical”.43 He sees in Piero della Francesco a Christian artist, who (from his perspective) transcended Christianity and followed the path of Plutarch’s Lives with his “worship of what is admirable in man” and the ability to “praise human dignity” even in his “technically religious pictures”.44 “The Best Picture” is a summary of Huxley’s views not only on what is good art, but also on what is bad art. He goes to some lengths to show what bad art really is, and focuses on ways of differentiating between two sorts of bad art:  “that which is merely dull, stupid and incompetent, the negatively bad; and the positively bad, which is a lie and a sham”.45 Huxley embarks at this point on a discourse he often used in this period, both in non-​fiction and in his 40 Ibid.,185–​186. 41 Ibid., 186. 42 Ibid., 189. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Huxley, Along the Road, 186.

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novels: Antic Hay and Those Barren Leaves. Robert S. Baker, in The Dark Historic Page, described Huxley’s support for (neo)classical architecture and painting, the “disciplined restraint of Wren’s art”, and disdain for “baroque-​romantic style”, which “is always associated in Huxley’s mind with both violently comic deformation and histrionic emotions”.46 In “The Best Picture” the brunt of Huxley’s critique is directed at the key representatives of baroque style (Bernini) and romantic style (Wagner). In a camp gesture Huxley declares: “Sometimes the charlatan is also a first-​rate man of genius and then you have such strange artists as Wagner and Bernini, who can turn what is false and theatrical into something almost sublime”.47 In his assessment of Huxley’s essay entitled “The Best Picture?”, M.  D. Aschlieman pointed out that Huxley was “in good company in his praise” of Piero della Francesca’s work, together with: John Addington Symonds in the 1880s, Bernard Berenson in 1902, Kenneth Clark in 1951, and John Russell in the 1960s. Aschlieman, perceptively I  think, put all of these critics in a very distinguished category: What the many admirers of the Christian Platonist Piero (and of other great orthodox artists such as Dante, Bach, Shakespeare, and Eliot) may dimly understand, and cling to, is that both religion and idealism —​including duty and honor in one’s work and daily life —​are kept alive by a faith: a faith that we live in a metaphysical and moral as well as a physical universe, that true value ultimately triumphs over inert or brutal fact, that spirit triumphs over flesh —​if not here, then hereafter.48 Aschlieman found the second part of the essay much weaker: “Huxley’s own argument is initially interesting and powerful but ultimately oblique and incomplete—​oddly so, given that he was one of the best educated, most verbally clever and most sheerly intelligent of major 20th century writers”.49 In “The Best Picture” Huxley goes astray (as if carried away by his erudition) from the initial theme of the essay, Piero della Francesca’s “Ressurection”, into general musings on the nature of art, and later into a description of other masterpieces of Piero, and the travails the narrative persona had to live through to get to remote places such as Sansepolcro, Arezzo or Urbino. However, despite 46 Baker, The Dark Historic Page, 67. 47 Huxley, Along the Road, 187. 48 M.D. Aschlieman “The Best Picture?”, National Review, http://​www.nationalreview.com/​ article/​359094/​greatest-​painting-​m-​d-​aeschliman, 2013, last accessed 28.05.2019. 49 Aschlieman, “The Best Picture”.

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narrative weaknesses which can be detected in some of Huxley’s notes and essays gathered in Along the Road, the book as such remains a testimony to Huxley’s erudition and skills both as an essayist and a travel writer. 2

Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and His Italian Travels

Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz—​unlike Huxley, who in Along the Road tried hard to place his persona away from the crowd of (mostly British) tourists and Grand Tourists—​from the opening lines of his dedication to Paweł Hertz50 to the closing passage of the final chapter entitled “Conegliano” made it clear that he was keen to embark on the convention which might be called a ‘sentimental Grand Tour classic’ the model of which since 1817 had been Goethe’s Italienische Reise. In the dedication Iwaszkiewicz wrote: Dear Paweł! This book is the result of your initiative. It is a different matter altogether that this initiative was in line with my intentions lurking for a long time in my sub-​consciousness; when I was looking for some motto for this scribbling I found in an old volume of the works of Heinrich Heine a fragment, underlined several years or maybe several decades ago with the note “motto” written in the margin. So, it seems that in those distant times there lived in me an idea to write about everything which connected me with travels to Italy. Maybe because it was the fulfilment of an idea undertaken so long ago that the writing of this book has taken relatively little time. While I was writing I tried to avoid dull chronology, although this is a description of journeys undertaken over more than half a century. I think that a reader will be more interested in some undivided whole, not divided chronologically into separate years. This reader will then be able to see a certain unity of my travels […] I thought that it was necessary to join together here various issues, in the same way as they are joined together in me by my writer’s personality. I even might use the phrase ‘my artistic personality’, because I write here in the same way about music, painting and architecture, as about

50

Paweł Hertz (1918–​2001) was the editor of the travel series in the piw publishing house in the 1970s and a friend of Iwaszkiewicz, who asked him to write two books: one on his travels to Italy and one on his travels in Poland.

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poetry and prose. For the reason that these travels have developed and mirrored the whole of my individuality. Although in this book I present a certain whole, a certain whole of Italy which over the years has been constructed in my understanding of the world, however, it has been undoubtedly the great art of travelling which has influenced my personality and has taught me to learn about, understand and express the surrounding world. There is no doubt that what I have written to a certain extent shows my way, lessons and experiences, and thus the meaning of a confession or an intimate diary to what might have been an objective description of externality. I have an impression that in this way this book stands out from other descriptions of travels to Italy, and that, according to Heine’s directions, tells more about me than about the beautiful world out there.51 Heine’s motto, which Iwaszkiewicz selected, comes from Die Bäder von Lucca (1829), and states that there is only one thing which is more boring than reading Italian travel books: writing them; and that there is only one way to make them more bearable: to try hard to write as little as possible about Italy. Iwaszkiewicz

51 Iwaszkiewicz, Podróże do Włoch, 7–​8,“Drogi Pawle!/​Książka ta zrodziła się z twojej inicjatywy. Inna rzecz, że inicjatywa ta zbiegła się z zamiarami od dawna utajonymi w mojej podświadomości; gdy szukałem jakiegoś motta dla tej pisaniny, odnalazłem w starym tomie dzieł Henryka Heinego zakreślone kilkanaście albo i kilkadziesiąt lat temu fragment z notą „motto” napisaną z boku. Więc chyba już od tamtych bardzo odległych czasów żył we mnie zamiar napisania o wszystkim, co mnie z podróżami do Italii wiązało. Może dlatego, że było to spełnienie dawno przedsięwziętego zamiaru, napisanie tej książki zabrało mi stosunkowo niewiele czasu./​Pisząc ją starałem się uniknąć nudnej chronologii, choć jest to opis podróży przedsiębranych na przestrzeni przeszło pół wieku. Uważam, że bardziej zainteresuje czytelnika pewna nierozkawałkowana całość, nie podzielona chronologicznie na osobne lata; ujrzy on wtedy pewną jedność moich podróży […] Uważałem za potrzebne połączyć tu różnorodne sprawy tak samo, jak łączą się one we mnie, mając za wspólny mianownik moją osobowość pisarską./​Powiedziałbym nawet ‘moją osobowość artystyczną’, gdyż piszę tutaj tak samo o muzyce, malarstwie i architekturze, jak o poezji i prozie literackiej. Podróże te bowiem były rozwinięciem i odbiciem całej mojej indywidualności./​Choć w książce tej daję obraz pewnej całości, obraz tej Italii, jaka z latami powstała w moim pojmowaniu świata, to jednak niewątpliwie wielka sztuka podróżowania przyczyniła się do rozwoju mojej osobowości i uczyła mnie poznawać, rozumieć i wyrażać świat otaczający. Nie ulega wątpliwości, że to co napisałem, w pewnym stopniu pokazuje moją drogę, nauki i przypadki doświadczenia, które nadają znaczenie spowiedzi czy intymnego dziennika temu, co miałoby być obiektywnym opisem zewnętrzności. Mam wrażenie, że w ten sposób ta książka wyróżnia się wśród innych opisów podróży do Italii i że w myśl wskazań Heinego, mówi więcej o mnie niż o tamtym pięknym świecie”.

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put this motto between two other quotations, both from Polish nineteenth-​ century writers and travellers to Italy: Adam Mickiewicz and Franciszek Salezy Dmochowski. Altogether these three mottos form a classical, intertextual paratext establishing from the very beginning (they are put before the dedication to Paweł Hertz) on the one hand the aura of ‘Grand Tour erudition’, and on the other, the importance of the writer’s own individual perspective. Heine was writing a dozen years after Goethe came to edit his original, youthful Italian journal into a sentimental travel narrative focusing on his individual intellectual and spiritual development fostered by exposure to Italy. In the fragment Iwaszkiewicz chose, it was exactly this ‘sentimental’, individual aspect of representing Italy which was stressed, and to which Iwaszkiewicz kept returning in his Podróże do Włoch. Strangely enough, Goethe’s classic is not referred to even once in Podróże do Włoch. This fact was pointed out by Iwaszkiewicz’s perceptive critic Dorota Kozicka, who noted that Iwaszkiewicz was strongly influenced by Goethe, and that in his much earlier travel narrative Książka o Sycylii (A Book about Sicily) (1946) he had written: “The whole town reverberates with the same noises as it did in the times of Goethe, who notes these barbarian noises with surprise”.52 The lack of any mention of Goethe’s classic is even more surprising if we take into account how often in Podróże do Włoch Iwaszkiewicz refers to various comments and challenges other artistic Grand Tour narratives. In the Introduction, when writing about his fascination with the art of ‘divine Caravaggio (‘boski Caravaggio’), he remarks: Even in such a progressive book as Muratov’s Images of Italy he [Caravaggio] is not even mentioned at all. Kremer knows him and dishes up different anecdotes about him. However, he does not list a single painting of his. While for me these are perhaps the greatest—​and anyway the strangest—​painterly experiences I have had in Italy.53 Both Kramer and Muratov return later on, in the chapter of Tuscany, when Iwaszkiewicz describes his stays in San Gimignano and his fascination with

52

Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Książka o Sycylii, 195, “Całe miasto brzmi tymi odgłosami, dziś tak samo jak za czasów Goethego, który ze zdziwieniem notuje te barbarzyńskie hałasy”. Quoted in Kozicka, Wędrowcy światów prawdziwych, ff. 173–​174. 53 Iwaszkiewicz, Podróże do Włoch, 10, “nawet w tak postępowej książce jak Obrazy Włoch Muratowa, nie jest wcale wymieniony. Kremer zna go i przytacza o nim różne anegdoty, nie wymienia jednak ani jednego jego dzieła. A  dla mnie są to może największe—​w każdym razie najdziwniejsze—​przeżycia malarskie, jakich doznałem we Włoszech”.

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Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescos, particularly with “St. Augustine’s Journey to Rome”. It is then that he states: Muratov noticed only about St. Monica that she is pensive. Why, after all, this is the very essence of Benozzi’s frescoes (particularly of “St. Augustine Departing for Milan”), that this notorious joy of life is something apparent. It seems, therefore, that it was a popular statement—​Kremer and Muratov, and even the guide-​book (ce charmant peintre)—​after all, the key feature of these people is that they are deep in thought, pensive, that they deliberate on life.54 So, the three Grand Tour books found wanting by Iwaszkiewicz in their rendering of Benozzi’s cycle of frescoes about the life of St. Augustine are Pavel Muratov’s Obrazy Italii (Images of Italy), (1924), Józef Kremer’s Podróż do Włoch (A Journey to Italy) (1879), and an unspecified guide-​book. Thus, Iwaszkiewicz, once again in an off-​hand way, attempts to strengthen his authority as a perceptive critic of art, able to spot weaknesses and shallowness in the assessments of two professional art historians (Kremer and Muratov), the authors of ‘canonical’ works on Italian art, to whom he also refers at many other points. While describing his visits to Lucca, Iwaszkiewicz refers to the Italian travel narratives of August Moszyński, but he also returns once again to Heine and Muratov.55 Other Grand Tour books referred to by Iwaszkiewicz are the ones written by Maria Luiza Kaschnitz, Guido Piovane, and Hyppolite Taine. Iwaszkiewicz is, in one way or another, critical of all of them. He finds Piovane “too languid”56 and accuses Taine of travelling “through beautiful and rare words”: These strained attempts to describe permanently beautiful words and selecting the rarest of words to do so, the meanings of which should be looked up in a Larousse dictionary, are a very irritating procedure. And although Taine impresses with his philosophical background and his experience as a writer, his journey to Italy ceases to be an example, when one sees how he attempts to put generic pictures in order, how he wants

54

55 56

Ibid., 51, “Muratow tylko u świętej Moniki zauważył, że zamyślona. A  przecież to jest właśnie istota fresków Benozza (zwłaszcza Podróży do Mediolanu), że owa osławiona radość życia jest u nich czymś pozornym. Widać było to określenie obiegowe—​i Kremer i Muratow, i nawet przewodnik (ce charmant peintre) je powtarza—​przecież cechą tych ludzi jest głębokie zamyślenie, zastanowienie się nad życiem”. Ibid.,58–​64. Ibid.,12, “zbyt rozwlekły”.

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to strike with the picturesque aspect of descriptions and great sophistication of language, which today is much simpler.57 For all his criticism of his literary and artistic predecessors in Italian travels, Iwaszkiewicz does not challenge the very form of a classical Grand Tour book.58 He states that his goals are modest and that he will merely try to be “more modern in reactions than my predecessors”.59 And he achieves what he has promised to do in the sense that his Podróże do Włoch is a book similar in structure and in content to the books of his predecessors, and at the same time is written in relatively simple and straightforward language. Similarly to the majority of his predecessors, Iwaszkiewicz decided to use the structure not of an itinerary of an individual journey, or of several journeys, but chose towns, cities and regions to be the focus of his chapters, which are ordered as follows: Venice, Tuscany, Rome, Naples, Bari, Amalphi, Sicily, Conegliano. The first, 1977, edition of the book was adorned with forty black and white photographs. The list of illustrations which followed includes the information that three of these pictures were taken by Bazyli Siergiejev, and the remaining thirty seven by Hanna Balcerzak. It was followed by a Bibliography (page 235) as well as a Name Index (pages 239–​247) and Geographical Index (pages 249–​251). The one-​page-​long bibliography consisted of thirty six sources. Apart from the books of Iwaszkiewicz’s predecessors on Italian Grand Tours, it included quite a random collection of books on art written in Italian, French, German and Polish. All these paratexts of the bibliography and the indexes seem to be the joint effort of Paweł Hertz, the editor of the series in which the book was first published and the addressee of the opening “Dedication”, and Iwaszkiewicz himself, to ‘market’ Podróże do Włoch as a ‘serious’ Grand Tour volume, rather than as some more or less ordinary contemporary travel narrative. The choice of these paratexts is supported throughout the book with numerous explicit statements about the artistic, Grand Tour character of it. It seems that this was a conscious strategy on the part of Iwaszkiewicz, and, as 57

Ibid., “To wysilone staranie się opisywania ciągle pięknych widoków i dobieranie w tym celu najrzadszych słów, takich, których znaczenia trzeba szukać w słowniku Larusse’a jest procederem bardzo irytującym. I choć Taine imponuje swoim przygotowaniem filozoficznym, swoją wielką zaprawą pisarską, to podróż jego do Italii przestaje być wzorem, kiedy się dostrzega jak stara się on szeregować rodzajowe obrazki, jak chce uderzać malowniczą stroną opisu i ogromnym wyszukaniem języka, który dziś się znacznie uprościł”. 58 On Iwaszkiewicz’s references to Grand Tour narratives in Journeys to Italy see also Tomasz Wroczyński, Późna eseistyka Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza, Warszawa, 1990, 70–​73. 59 Iwaszkiewicz, Podróże do Włoch, 12, “ nowocześniejszy w reakcjach od moich poprzedników”.

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I will now argue in the following paragraphs, there is little doubt that when in 1975 Paweł Hertz—​a life-​long friend of Iwaszkiewicz and an editor of a serie Podróże in piw—​approached him about writing a book about his travels, Iwaszkiewicz—​who was then in his early eighties—​saw it as an opportunity to write a sort of ‘apologia’ of his long life. Or, in fact, two apologias, because we should remember that in 1975 Iwaszkiewicz started simultaneously writing (and compiling) two books, both of which were first published in 1977 in Hertz’s series. These two were ‘companion volumes’, a ‘Grand Tour book’ and a ‘Home Tour book’, respectively, and their affinity is strengthened by the identical form of the titles: Podróże do Włoch (Travels to Italy) and Podróże do Polski (Travels to Poland). Whereas the proposition ‘do’ (to) in Polish is obvious with the first title—​after all, Iwaszkiewicz, a Pole, was travelling ‘to Italy’—​it looks strange, at least at first sight, in the case of the second title, Podróże do Polski (Travels to Poland). It seems that, for a Pole, travelling should be performed ‘po Polsce’ (in Poland), rather than ‘do Polski’ (to Poland). But there is an explanation for this in the author’s note of Podróże do Polski: My biography has been such that thrice in my life “I was travelling to Poland”, I was going to my patria as if from the outside, I was going in its direction—​half pilgrim, half tourist […]60 Iwaszkiewicz moved with his family to Warsaw from Ukraine in 1902, and then kept visiting this city around 1914. In 1918 he ran away from the Bolshevik Revolution, from Kiev (where he was a student) to Poland, which was just regaining independence. Apart from the parallels in titles and in the retrospective character of Podróże do Polski and Podróże do Włoch, these two books also differ quite considerably. They differ in the ways in which they were written: whereas in the case of Podróże do Polski Iwaszkiewicz had used several fragments of his earlier non-​fictional narratives published elsewhere and simply ‘connected’ them with his narration written in 1975–​1977, Podróże do Włoch was written at the same time from scratch. Why? After all, in his life Iwaszkiewicz had published even more non-​fictional narratives about Italy, starting with his short reports from his first trips to Italy in the 1920s, published by Wiadomości Literackie, to a full book entitled Książka o Sycylii (A Book about Sicily) (1956). One can only speculate that Podróże do Włoch was more important to Iwaszkiewicz as an ‘apologia pro vita sua’, and the need to construct himself as a Grand Tourist 60

Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Podróże do Polski, 9, “Tak się moja biografia złożyła, że trzykrotnie w ciągu mojego życia „jechałem do Polski, wybierałem się do mojej ojczyzny jak gdyby z zewnątrz, zmierzałem ku niej—​pół pielgrzym, pół turysta”.

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more poignant than the need to construct himself as a Home Tourist, “half pilgrim and half tourist”. Before attempting to describe the most characteristic means used by Iwaszkiewicz in Podróże do Włoch to construct his persona as an artist, an heir to the tradition of European-​Mediterranean culture, it seems worthwhile to ponder for a while not on what is included in the book, but on what is not there. In order to do so, some basic facts from Iwaszkiewicz’s long and colourful life should be put together. He was twenty-​four years old when he ‘travelled to Poland’ for the third time, running away from Kiev and the Bolsheviks in 1918. He quickly started to participate in the artistic, social and political life of Poland, which had just regained its independence after one hundred and twenty three years of partitions. He became an important member of the key poetic group “Skamander”. From 1927 he was in the diplomatic service, and in 1930s he was a secretary in Polish diplomatic missions in Copenhagen and Brussels. In 1922 he married Anna Lilpop, the daughter of a rich industrialist; the couple settled down in Stawisko, a large manor house on the outskirts of Warsaw. In the interwar period Iwaszkiewicz published seven volumes of poetry, several novels, many short stories, three plays, and numerous reviews and articles. During the Second World War Stawisko became a refuge for runaway Poles and Polish Jews. After the war, in a Poland run by Communists, he co-​operated with the authorities. In the period 1952–​1980, he was an ‘independent’ MP in a Parliament dominated and run by Polish Communists. He was chairman of Związek Literatów Polskich (the Union of Polish Writers) in 1945–​1946, 1947–​1949, and from 1959 till his death in 1980. Polish Communists were given power in 1944–​1945 by Stalin’s Red Army. If one was not ready to wholeheartedly support the new rulers and the social and class revolution they were embarking on, there were generally three options left, not only to writers and artists, but to all citizens. The first: to run into exile (or stay in exile as millions of people had been exiled from Poland during the war). The second: to go into so-​called ‘internal exile’, to lie low and try to survive in one’s own niche. And the third: to co-​operate with the new regime more or less actively. These were really horrible totalitarian times in Poland (as well as in the Soviet Union and nations under that country’s ‘patronage’), when all three options were extremely difficult and had numerous drawbacks, and it is not my object here to accuse and attack but to analyse and understand. Iwaszkiewicz belonged to the third group. He was one of those apparently ‘independent’ artists who did not become members of the Communist party and were allowed by the party to have an artistic and social role in the life of the nation, on the understanding that they would not challenge the Party and its policies openly, and would serve as its fig leaves, both in the internal and in

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the international context. Dorota Kozicka, who wrote very perceptively about Iwaszkiewicz’s Italian travel narratives, mused: It seems to be an interesting fact that in his autobiography [Podróże do Włoch], written at the end of his life, there are no problems of a social, political or ethical nature. There are only artistic, existential or emotional doubts. The sphere of crucial, political choices is here totally closed, even more than the sphere of homo-​erotic conditioning (which are, involuntarily shown in the description of life events, although are not directly dealt with). It is, of course, difficult to give a final verdict, to what extent it is a conscious choice of the writer, and to what extent the requirement of the reality of that time.61 The two issues which Kozicka touched upon in this fragment, the homo-​erotic and the political, are connected by the fact that in 1975–​1977 the institution of censorship in Poland existed, and that it ‘catered for’ both homo-​erotic as well as for political issues. Yet neither gay nor political ‘coming out’ was conceivable or possible in a book published officially in Poland in 1977. Iwaszkiewicz could neither have stated “I have been bi-​sexual” on the one hand, nor, on the other: “Yes, I have been an opportunist who served the Communist party but I have helped many people oppressed by the system”. I believe that the claim put forward by Kozicka that we cannot know to what extent the lack of social, political and ethical issues in Podróże do Włoch was Iwaszkiewicz’s conscious choice and to what extent it was the requirement of the reality of that time is simply wrong, for there was no either/​or situation. Not to write about politics and ethics was both a conscious decision and was, of course, at the same time also a requirement of the times. What is more, these two aspects dovetailed very nicely with Iwaszkiewicz’s other very conscious decision: to construct his persona in Travels to Italy as an artist of truly European dimensions, one of the last of the Grand Tourists who was in this way able to reject political and ethical issues as mere trifles.

61 Kozicka, Wędrowcy światów prawdziwych, p.  201, “Interesujący wydaje się fakt, że w pisanej u schyłku życia autobiografii [Podróże do Włoch—​G.M.] nie ma zagadnień i problemów natury społecznej, politycznej, etycznej. Pojawiają się tylko wątpliwości natury artystycznej, egzystencjalnej czy emocjonalnej. Sfera życiowych, politycznych wyborów jest tu zupełnie zamknięta, bardziej nawet niż sfera homoerotycznych uwarunkowań (bo te ujawniają się mimowolnie w przebiegu życiowych wydarzeń, choć nie są bezpośrednio podejmowane). Trudno oczywiście wyrokować, na ile jest to świadomy wybór pisarza, a na ile wymóg ówczesnej rzeczywistości”.

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In his opening letter to Paweł Hertz—​an important paratext the key fragments of which have been quoted above—​Iwaszkiewicz explicitly presented his three crucial goals for the book. One: the key focus of the book, and its organizing principle, is to be Iwaszkiewicz’s “artistic” personality, which he sees as an extension of his “writer’s” personality, to show from the beginning that his (professional) interests extended beyond literature to such ‘artistic’ areas as music and the visual arts. Two: that this artistic personality was, to a large extent, shaped by “the great art of travelling which has influenced [his] personality and taught [him] to learn about, understand and express the surrounding world”. And finally, three: that this centrality of Iwaszkiewicz’s artistic personality led to the situation in which he managed to show his own, individual “way, lessons and experiences, and thus give the meaning of a confession or an intimate diary to what might have been an objective description of externality”. Iwaszkiewicz’s opening statements clearly and explicitly name the key feature of ‘artistic (sentimental) travel narratives’. Iwaszkiewicz used the personal character of ‘artistic Grand Tour narratives’ to introduce elements of “a confession or intimate journal”. However, his confessions are restricted to artistic and existential issues, (consciously) disregarding political or sexually intimate ones. This book shows the portrait of an Artist, with his existential doubts and hopes, the picture of Iwaszkiewicz he wanted posterity to have of him. Throughout the book Iwaszkiewicz carefully describes himself over and over again as an artist, a professional writer, a poet, a short story writer, a novelist and an essayist, who might have become a professional musician, and someone with a deep personal interest in the visual arts. Iwaszkiewicz frequently presents himself as a great fan of both classical and contemporary music, to a certain extent through descriptions of deep impressions made by concerts he went to while in Italy (and also, earlier in Kiev) of such great performing artists and composers as Igor Stravinsky, Artur Rubinstein, Jerzy Semkow, and Witold Lutosławski, who are carefully presented as more or less intimate friends; dinners, meetings, and conversations with them are recalled at some length. But it is another friendship, with a professional musician, the great Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882–​1937), a cousin of Iwaszkiewicz, which runs deeply through the whole of Podróże do Włoch; there are more than thirty references to his name listed in the index at the end of the book. And it is Szymanowski, an older cousin and a mentor, who is the persona’s guide in the first of his Italian journeys. Iwaszkiewicz begins the chapter about Sicily by agreeing with the statement of Helena Zaworska presented during her lecture on Iwaszkiewicz’s Italian travels in Warsaw in 1975 (when Iwaszkiewicz was starting to write Podróże do Włoch) that Iwaszkiewicz’s first

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journey to Italy took place in 191862 “in the company of Karol Szymanowski, while both close friends did not leave Elizawetgrad [now in Ukraine], lost in the chaos of war”. Iwaszkiewicz himself describes this journey undertaken by Szymanowski in memory, as he was recalling his earlier, ‘real’ visits to Italy, particularly to Sicily, and by himself in the imagination as “probably the most pleasant and, anyway, the most unusual of my travels”.63 Whereas the ‘musical’ aspect of Iwaszkiewicz’s persona in Travels to Italy is presented mostly through close ups with the art and personalities of the great musicians like Szymanowski, Rubinstein or Stravinsky, the techniques used to describe this persona’s close acquaintance with painting are different. Yes; there is one friend described in the process, Józio Rajnfeld, Iwaszkiewicz’s guide during his first visit to Tuscany and San Gimignano. But Rajnfeld’s name, though himself a very talented and devout artist-​painter, would not normally be mentioned together with Szymanowski or Stravinsky. Iwaszkiewicz constructs his own persona as an ardent, if amateur, aficionado of painting. The opening chapters of the book—​on Venice, Tuscany, Rome and Naples—​are to a certain extent about architecture, but are mostly about the persona’s ‘meetings’ with the ‘old masters’. In the first chapter, on Venice, the narrator muses: I always go with joy to Scuola San Rocca and always leaving it remember only the Nativity painting on the wall divided crosswise with a wooden beam and looking like a scene from Shakespeare. I also remember the mourning group under the cross on the huge Crucifixion—​but there is nothing unusual here—​as, for example, in the crucifix from the fourteenth century hanging in the cathedral in Sandomierz. However, I remember and will remember Annunciation, but Annunciation is painted by Titian. This easel painting is not big, showing two women leaning towards each other, both pregnant, and hidden in the shadow, as if not very serious, of Saint Joseph. This painting speaks with its rhythm, its hint, its expression. This is a speaking painting—​and there is no need for speaking in the ways of German expressionists or horrible Mexican frescoes.

62 Iwaszkiewicz, Podróże do Włoch, 192, “[…]w towarzystwie Karola Szymanowskiego, przy czym obaj przyjaciele nie ruszali się z pogrążonego w odmętach wojny Elizawetgradu”. See also Helena Zaworska, Sztuka podróżowania:  Poetyckie mity podróży w twórczości Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza, Juliana Przybosia i Stanisława Różewicza (Poetic Myths in the Writings of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Julian Przyboś and Stanisław Różewicz), Kraków, 1980. 63 Iwaszkiewicz, Podróże do Włoch, 192, “[…] chyba najprzyjemniejsza, w każdym razie najniezwyklejsza z moich podróży”.

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For all that, Picasso also speaks to me. What is greatness in painting? It is absolutely not known.64 This is quite a characteristic fragment in which Iwaszkiewicz uses a variety of means to construct his persona as an aficionado of painting. He repeats the word “always” twice while describing the regularity of his visits to the Venetian gallery of Saint Rocco, and feels free to openly admit that he “always” remembers only just one painting and forgets all the others. Yet he mentions the second painting, Crucifixion, not so much in order to really describe it, but to remark that there is nothing remarkable in it. This statement, in turn, is written probably for one purpose only:  to introduce his ability to discern great, remarkable art not only in Italian galleries, but also in a relatively unknown cathedral in a small town in Poland; it is one element in his project to keep presenting Poland and Polish art (his own included) as part of the great European tradition. And last but not least, Iwaszkiewicz presents the concept that what matters in painting is that it “speaks”. Such a stance implicitly assumes three notions. One, that what really matters in painting is not its technical aspects, but some not very precise, but ‘spiritual’ category of ‘speaking to someone’. The second implicit assumption is that of the sensibility, sensitivity and readiness of the subject to whom the great art is ‘speaking’. The third one is that both Titian and Picasso are great, ‘speaking’ artists who need proper ‘beholders’ to have their greatness recognized. But it is not exclusively the category of “speaking paintings” that Iwaszkiewicz relies on in descriptions of his numerous visits to Italian galleries and churches. As mentioned before, Iwaszkiewicz, in Podróże do Włoch, in order to stress his credentials as an amateur art critic, often challenges his predecessors’ views on art and individual artists expressed in the Grand Tour artistic travel narratives: Taine, Kremer or Muratov. He also challenges the ways and 64

Ibie., 26–​27, “Zawsze z radością idę do Scuola San Rocco i zawsze wychodząc z niej pamiętam tylko obraz Bożego Narodzenia na ścianie podzielonej poprzecznie drewnianą belką i wyglądający jak szekspirowska scena. Pamiętam także grupę żałobną pod krzyżem na ogromnym Ukrzyżowaniu—​ale nie ma tu nic niezwykłego—​jak np. w krucyfiksie z xiv wieku, który wisi w katedrze w Sandomierzu. Natomiast pamiętam i będę pamiętał także w Warszawie Nawiedzenie, ale Nawiedzenie jest malowane przez Tycjana. Nieduży może niedokończony obraz sztalugowy, przedstawiający nachylone ku sobie dwie niewiasty, obie w poważnym stanie, i zatajony w cieniu i jakby trochę niepoważny święty Józef. Ten obraz mówi swoim rytmem, swoim cieniem, swoim wyrazem. To jest malarstwo mówiące—​i nie potrzeba mówienia sposobami ekspresjonistów niemieckich czy ohydnych fresków meksykańskich. Zresztą Picasso także mów do mnie. Cóż to jest wielkość malarstwa? Absolutnie nie wiadomo”.

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means of professional art critics, and it is Bernard Berenson65 who fares worst of all; the diatribe against this prolific and affluent art critic ends in this way: […] And even the most detached and correct of Berenson’s judgements, the most comprehensible of his campaigns always seem to me to be lined with some personal goal. If only to dazzle a reader or a listener with some incredible conclusion, to stun the average audience with his judgements. Fortunately, it is not for these goals that I write here about art—​and not to boast with my limited erudition—​but in order to sum up for myself the experiences which longstanding wanderings in the South have given me.66 This fragment seems to be either extremely hypocritical or extremely naïve. For it is really either hypocritical or naïve to claim that Berenson (or, in fact any other professional critic or writer) was using his erudition and literary skills for mercantile purposes, and that he, Iwaszkiewicz, was absolutely disinterested in doing so, as if he himself was not going to receive any royalties, on the one hand, or any reviews on the other. I am convinced that it was written to show that Iwaszkiewicz’s erudition about Italian art was not so limited after all (as he claimed in this fragment, with what might be judged false modesty), and instead was capable of heated debate with the greatest of art critics and Grand Tour writers. The recurring descriptions of the art and life of Caravaggio seem to be bent on the same goal, and Iwaszkiewicz in different fragments presents his encounters with the paintings of Caravaggio (thirteen of whose paintings are described by Iwaszkiewicz in the text and dutifully listed with their titles underneath in the index of names under the entry: “Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi)”67 as well as his own artistic discoveries and experiences in a manner reminiscent of the way of Huxley describes the paintings of Pieter Breughel.

65 Ibid., 10, “Ale aby samemu sobie zsumować te przeżycia, jakie dawały mi te długoletnie wędrówki na Południu. Bernard Berenson (1865–​1959) was an American art historian specializing in the Italian Renaissance. His numerous essays and books on art include: The Drawings of the Florentine Painters (1904) and Aesthetics and History in Visual Arts (1948). 66 Ibid., “I najbardziej oderwane, najbardziej słuszne sądy Berensona, najbardziej zrozumiałe jego batalie wydają mi się zawsze podszyte jakimś osobistym celem. Chociażby tym, aby olśnić czytelnika czy słuchacza jakimś niebywałym wnioskiem, chociażby tylko, aby epatować swoimi sądami przeciętną publiczność. Na szczęście nie dla tych celów piszę tutaj o sztuce—​i nie żeby pochwalić się wątłą moją erudycją. Ale by samemu zsumować te przeżycia, jakie dawały mi długoletnie wędrówki na Południe.” 67 Ibid., 240.

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Yet, it is not music or the visual arts but literature which is central in Iwaszkiewicz’s construction of his persona, not only as an (amateur) art critic, but, first of all, as a professional writer deeply embedded in the great European tradition. Podróże do Włoch is, to a large extent, devoted to Iwaszkiewicz’s own writings:  poems, plays, short stories and novels. The list following the entry “Iwaszkiewicz Jarosław” in the index of names includes fifty titles.68 They are referred to in various contexts and for various purposes: he quotes prose and poetic fragments of many of his works in the autobiographical context of his Italian travels. He describes plans for texts which have never been published, written or even started (like a poetic novel about Venice, or a novel about Queen Bona Sforza), lists sources and inspirations for his texts, reminisces about texts written while in Italy with non-​Italian settings and characters. As a writer who is not shy to pronounce and accept his literary merits, Iwaszkiewicz also offers suggestions for future interpreters of his works, as in this fragment: My literary ties with Sicily are stronger than with other parts of Italy. This ‘wild’ island is proud of such writers as Verga, Pirandello, Lampedusa, all of whom have been objects of my admiration, and who knows if they have influenced my imagination and works. But this will be decided by some new researchers and specialists, who will be versed in Italian literature.69 Iwaszkiewicz—​who for whole decades was the chairman of the Polish Union of Writers during a period when the majority of Poles were for administrative and financial reasons imprisoned in Poland—​travelled regularly, often to Italy, to various writers’ congresses and meetings, and was keen to describe in his writings personal acquaintances with the likes of Alberto Moravia, Berthold Brecht and Carlo Levi.70 Iwaszkiewicz was not shy at all to brag in considerable detail about his V.I.P. credentials, for example when he described how he had been a member of the Prix Balzan, which awarded the Peace Prize to Pope John xxiii.71 While describing one of his visits to the Teatro Argentina in Rome he remarked: 68 See also Kozicka, Wędrowcy światów prawdziwych, 189. 69 Iwaszkiewicz, Podróże do Włoch, 81, “Z Sycylią wiążą mnie także węzły literacki bardziej niż z innymi częściami Włoch. Ta ‘dzika’ wyspa szczyci się bowiem takimi pisarzami jak Verga, Pirandello, Lampedusa, którzy wszyscy byli przedmiotem mojego zachwytu i kto wie, czy nie oddziaływali na moją wyobraźnię i twórczość. Ale o tym to już zadecydują jacyś nowi badacze i specjaliści, którym nieobca będzie włoska literatura”. 70 Ibid., 121–​123. 71 Ibid., 81–​82.

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The evening turned out to be splendid. During the break Ostrowski took me to the neighbouring loge and introduced me to Einaudi, the first president of Italy. It so happened that I was later to meet all the other successive presidents of Italy, with the exception of Leone, who is in office now. I will tell about them later, because each of them has played some role in my life.72 Iwaszkiewicz never fulfilled his promise, but the v.i.p. self-​promotion continued, and it reached its peak in the chapter on Naples when Iwaszkiewicz described his visit to Benedetto Croce in his palace at the end of the 1940s when Croce was in his eighties. Iwaszkiewicz describes Croce as aloof and detached from reality, and his palace as “(rotten) […] “full of shadows thrown by art nouveau lumber, burdened with masses of dusty books”.73 Iwaszkiewicz, who was in his eighties himself when he was writing Podróże do Włoch, continued with the statement that Croce becomes a symbol of old, passing European culture which is already breaking down. Yet, despite everything, I feel in my element in the shadow of this culture. Is it so that I also belong to this period which is passing? Probably yes, my Jarosław, and one should accept this fact and not flutter like a netted fish.74 But in other fragments of Podróże do Włoch Iwaszkiewicz tends to present the material remnants of European culture as ‘treasures’ rather than ‘lumber’. He defends ‘old Europe’ and its art, and at one moment declares, somewhat melodramatically: “I think that we, all of us for whom the word ‘art’ is full of other meanings, all who want to fight for it—​who knows if we will not suffer for art one day—​and who want to be united in this fight”.75 72

Ibid., 110–​111, “Wieczór udał się wspaniale, Ostrowski w przerwie zaprowadził mnie do sąsiedniej loży i przedstawił Eindaudiemu, pierwszemu prezydentowi Włoch. Tak się złożyło, że poznałem potem wszystkich kolejnych prezydentów Włoch, z wyjątkiem obecnego prezydenta Leone. Jeszcze o nich opowiem, bo każdy z nich odegrał pewną rolę w moim życiu”. 73 Ibid., 153  “[…]zmurszałym […] pełnym cieniów rzucanych przez secesyjne graty […], przytłoczony masą zakurzonych książek”. 74 Ibid., “[…]staje mi się symbolem starej, przemijającej, rozsypującej się już kultury europejskiej. A mimo wszystko w cieniu tej kultury czuję się w swoim żywiole—​czyżbym i ja należał do tej przemijającej epoki? Chyba tak, mój Jarosławie, i fakt ten trzeba zaakceptować—​i nie trzepotać się jak ryba w sieci”. 75 Iwaszkiewicz, Podróże do Włoch, 86, “Zdaje mi się, że tu powinniśmy się zjednoczyć, wszyscy dla których słowo sztuka pełne jest innych treści, którzy chcą jeszcze o nią walczyć—​a

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So, the concept of European culture and art is, even though he deems it to be in decline, central to Iwaszkiewicz in constructing his ‘artistic personality’, a notion which, in turn, is central in Podróże do Włoch. Thanks to the merging of fifty years of his visits and stays in Italy into one continuous narrative focused on art, Iwaszkiewicz not only managed to dodge the social and political problems that Italy, or for that matter, Poland, Europe and the world had gone through, but he also managed to focus on his persona’s contacts with Italian landscapes and art so much that he could dodge most descriptions of people: of ‘locals’, of Italians and of tourists. There is surprisingly little anti-​tourist discourse in Iwaszkiewicz’s book, apart from some odd comment like, “people are so harassing in museums”.76 The generic comparison of Huxley’s and Iwaszkiewicz’s travel narratives—​ similarly to the comparison made at the end of the previous Fermor/​Kapuściński chapter—​points to the differences between the stability of the travel book genre in Anglophone literature and to the generic confusion in the field of non-​fiction travel narratives in Polish literature. Huxley’s Along the Road is a collection of previously published essays (and ‘sketches’); there is no doubt whatsoever about its generic status raised by critics or scholars. Together with Jesting Pilate and Beyond the Mexique Bay, it is considered a travel book in the strictest sense. Iwaszkiewicz’s Podróże do Włoch was written for the Paweł Hertz series in the piw publishing house entitled Podróże. This word is the plural of podróż, a journey; and as we remember, at the end of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth was—​apart from its most common meaning of any journey—​used as a generic name for the genre comprising book length first person non-​fiction travel narratives. Paweł Hertz, in his series, edited and published great classics of this genre, both Polish and European: Kraszewski, Sienkiewicz and Wiszniowski, on the one hand, and Goethe, Heine, Dickens, Gautier, Chateaubriand and Hugo on the other. But by the end of the 1970s, when the Podróże series started to appear, the word’s generic meaning had been long forgotten. Hertz, an erudite man-​of-​letters, was aware of this, and it suited his old-​fashioned, canonical focus. Thus, the title of his series—​Podróże—​was a play on words: ‘journeys’ to all, and the old fashioned genre of podróż, as a shortened version of the generic name of opis podróży to aficionados. Iwaszkiewicz, who started his Podróże do Włoch with a dedication to Paweł Hertz, confessed in it that it was written on Hertz’s initiative, but nowhere in his book does he allude to the fact that he was trying to ‘re-​create’ the

76

kto wie, czy nie przyjdzie nam jeszcze cierpieć za sztukę—​i którzy chcą się w tej walce połączyć”. Ibid., 74, “l[…]ludzie tak okropnie przeszkadzają w muzeach”.

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old genre of the podróż. In fact, at the end of his life Iwaszkiewicz was content to go back to his numerous Italian trips in order to make sense of his life as an artist without bothering much about the work’s generic status. He must also have been content that Podróże do Włoch was succeeded in Hertz’s series by great Polish, French, German and English travel classics. Even though Iwaszkiewicz did not seem concerned about the nebulous generic aspect of his Podróże do Włoch, this book became one of the prime examples in the travel writing generic discussion which Dorota Kozicka had with such travel writing scholars as Czesław Niedzielski. As mentioned in the first chapter of this book, Czesław Niedzielski as well as other scholars like Artur Rejter or Bożena Witosz) postulated that the reportaż podróżniczy which developed in the twentieth century replaced the older genre of the podróż, and that all non-​fiction first person travel narratives can be regarded as examples of the reportaż podróżniczy. Kozicka called such an approach “an overgeneralization”77 and argued that alongside the reportaż podróżniczy there had developed a markedly different type of non-​fiction travel writing (she stopped short of calling it a genre) usually referred to as podróże intelektualne (intellectual travels). According to Kozicka, podróże intelektualne of the twentieth century developed out of such ‘artistic’ renderings of journeys as Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Goethe’s Italian Journey, Chateaubriand’s Voyage from Paris to Jerusalem, Byron’s Childe Harold or Słowacki’s Journey to the Holy Land;78 a tradition distinct and different from the journalistic tradition of the reportaż podróżniczy. Kozicka argued that podróże intelektualne published in the 1930s by such writers as Antoni Słonimski, Jerzy Wittlin, Zofia Kossak-​Szczucka, Juliusz Kaden-​Bandrowski and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz were written in clear opposition to journalistic reportaże podróżnicze,79 and that this opposition was equally clear and valid in the 1970s when Iwaszkiewicz was writing Podróże do Włoch. So, Iwaszkiewicz’s Podróże do Włoch is an example of reportaż podróżniczy for some scholars and podróż intelektualna for others. For bookstores it is simply książka podróżnicza: a useful term which can be literally translated as a ‘travel book’, a category so far not used in travel writing scholars’ discourse. When summing up the travel narratives of Aldous Huxley and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz from a generic angle, a more general pan-​European perspective is helpful because it reveals some striking similarities and differences. Both Huxley’s and Iwaszkiewicz’s texts are, to a large extent, essays and they display intricate connections with other hybrid genres like autobiographies and 77 Kozicka, “Dwudziestowieczne ‘podróże intelektualne’ ”, 44. 78 Ibid. 79 Kozicka, Wędrowcy światów prawdziwych, 48–​51.

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novels. As Peter France showed—​despite the different trajectories of the development of the the essay British and French literary tradition—​Montaigne found more disciples in Britain than in France.80 The same is probably also true about the Polish tradition, where literary essays have been intricately associated with travel narratives at least since Klin-​Kaliszewski’s “Kartki z podróży …” (1867–​1868). Iwaszkiewicz’s late travel narratives are at the same time memoirs as wells as essays. 80

Peter France, “British and French Traditions of the Essay”, in The Modern Essay in French:  Movement, Instability, Performance, ed. Charles Forsdick and Andrew Stafford, Bern, 2005, 40.

Conclusion The view from the generic and comparative bridge constructed in A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature reveals some aspects of both Anglophone and Polish travel writing which would be much more difficult to notice if one were locked within each of these literary traditions. The view onto the Anglophone side of the bridge shows the genre of the travel book developing dynamically but also steadily from the middle of the eighteenth century. Of course, it took many decades—​about the whole of the second half of the eighteenth century—​for the genres of the novel, autobiography and the travel book to disentangle themselves from one another and from their generic predecessors, and establish clearly separate horizons of expectations. Throughout the nineteenth century the main (at least from today’s perspective) type of travel book developed:  ‘the artistic travel book’; mostly written by professional novelists and men-​of-​letters, and focused on the subjective representation of often inauspicious travels by carefully constructed narrative personae. These travel books were characterized by their extensive use of what Henry Fielding called “ornaments of stile or diction, or even of circumstance”;1 a set of features which was to change with the development of the genres of the travel book and the novel and which today include: free indirect style, scenic construction, present-​tense narration, prolepsis and iterative symbolism.2 However, throughout the nineteenth century, alongside such ‘artistic’ travel books, there existed a different variety of narratives, also referred to as travel book’: the so-​called ‘exploration travel books’. They were relics of an earlier era of the Early Modern and Enlightenment ‘scientific’ travel narratives. They virtually disappeared more or less at the end of the century, the end of the Victorian period, when there were no more blank spots on the maps to be explored, and when there were no more explorers, just tourists and travellers. The travel book in the period between the wars easily accommodated the essay, which was no longer a “saleable commodity”. It became a device for getting published “learned essays which without exotic narrative support would find no audience”.3 Huxley’s Along the Road—​analysed at some length in the last chapter of the present study—​a collection of “notes and essays”, most of which had earlier been published in magazines and 1 Fielding, The Journal, 161. 2 See, Lodge, Practice of Writing, 9. 3 See Fussell, Abroad, 204.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004429611_009

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newspapers—​was written/​edited within the horizon of expectations created by earlier travel books, many of which had included essays of all kinds. But essays became an element influencing the creation of a new horizon within which later travel books were to be written, for example, Huxley’s own Jesting Pilate and Beyond the Mexique Bay, as well as Osbert Sitwell’s Winters of Content and Other Discursions on Travel, Art and Life, or Alan Pryce-​Jones’ The Spring Journey. On the other hand, the travel book genre between the wars also evolved in a different direction and became a platform for “radicals on the road”, authors who used it as a device to express their radical—​both left and right wing—​political views.4 As the world at the end of the nineteen thirties kept sliding into what became the second great war of the century, travel books’ hybridity was stretched once more to accommodate the journalistic genre of war reportage.5 For at least a century many travel writers had gone to some lengths to show that they were travellers, not tourists, but now they were forced to assume one more role: that of war correspondents. This process can perhaps be best perceived in W.H. Auden’s and Christopher Isherwood’s Journey to a War, published in March 1939, merging even at the level of its very title both a journey and a war. After World War ii, travel books tended to return to a traveller versus tourist groove, and have since continued to be popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Unlike in the earlier period though, the genre has ceased to be dominated by celebrity novelists, and has undergone a process of ‘specialization’. The great majority of the most popular and critically acclaimed authors of travel books are ‘travel writers’, not ‘novelists’: Eric Newby, Colin Thubron, Dervla Murphy, Robyn Davidson, Bill Bryson, Redmond O’Hanlon, Bruce Chatwin, Jan Morris, Patrick Leigh Fermor.6 One of them, Jan Morris, in an obituary for another one, Patrick Leigh Fermor, complained: “Few of us want to be call travel writers nowadays, the genre having been cheapened and weakened in these times of universal travel and almost universal literary ambition”.7 Yet another ‘travel 4 Bernard Schweizer, in his Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s (2001), analysed the travel books of four authors: George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Rebecca West. 5 Barbara Korte, in Represented Reporters: Images of War Correspondents in Memoirs and Fiction (2009), surveys the history of war reportage from the perspective of the representation of war correspondents in non-​fiction as well as in fiction. 6 Their ‘precursor’ was a nineteenth-​century American travel writer Taylor Bayard (1825–​1878). 7 Jan Morris, “A War Hero and a Writer of Grace: Paddy Was the Ideal Scholar Englishman”, https://​www.theguardian.com/​books/​2011/​jun/​12/​patrick-​leigh-​fermor-​by-​jan-​morris-​ obituary, last accessed 15.04.2019.

202 Conclusion writer’, Bruce Chatwin, felt so unhappy with this label attached to himself that he insisted on his publisher marketing The Songlines not as a travel book, but as a novel, arguing that: “The journey it describes is an invented journey, it is not a travel book in the generally accepted sense”.8 Yet, most travel writing scholars (as well as librarians and booksellers) of today, if asked, would probably say that The Songlines is a travel book. Anyway, it is certainly one according to Jan Borm’s definition adhered to throughout A Generic History of Travel Writing. From the generic perspective of the travel book Bruce Chatwin appears as one more writer who challenged/​straddled the dynamically constructed border between the two companion genres of the travel book and the novel, a border contested from the times of Jonathan Swift and Lawrence Sterne. Chatwin appears but one of the authors who in the 1970s and 1980s “revitalised the genre”, together with Jonathan Raban, William Dalrymple, Nicholas Cruise, Colin Thubron and Gavin Young.9 The name Patrick Leigh Fermor should also be added to this list. In A Time of Gifts he remained within the parameters of the travel book and at the same time reinvigorated it with his parallax perspective, with cornucopia of poetic paratexts, the nostalgia imbued in his language, and his gentleman-​scholar persona. It should be remembered that this revitalised genre of the travel book has managed to preserve, at least in some of its mainstream best-​sellers the nostalgic, conservative tone and according to Holland and Huggan these texts are “a refuge for complacent, even nostalgically retrograde values”.10 Debbie Lisle has gone even further, stating that “travel writing remains popular because it feeds on images of other utilised by colonial writers, and, as such, provides a sanctuary from contemporary ‘politically correct’ attitudes about race, gender, sexuality and class”.11 Unlike Huxley’s Along the Road and Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, the two Polish narratives analysed in the second part of A Generic History of Travel Writing, Kapuściński’s Travels with Herodotus and Iwaszkiewicz’s Podróże do Włoch cannot be easily anchored generically. The generic confusion of Polish travel writing, which, as postulated here, has existed from the middle of the nineteenth century, is particularly well seen from the middle of the bridge constructed here in contrast with the relative stability and firmness of the Anglophone 8 9 10 11

Quoted in Steve Finks, Notes from a Sick Room, London, 2017, 290. James J. Schramer, “Jonathan Raban” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 204 British Travel Writers, 1940–​1997, Detroit and London: Gale Research, 1999, 235. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters:  Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing, Ann Arbor, 2000, viii. Debbie Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, Cambridge, 2006, 19.

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travel book. Kapuściński started as a travelling reporter, and his travel narratives written in the 1960s and early 1970s are ‘clinical’ examples of the genre of the reportaż podróżniczy. They were collections of reportages, most of which had already been published in newspapers and magazines. But in the mid-​ 1970s Kapuściński—​as he himself was to admit later, to a large extent under the influence of Tom Wolfe and the notions of New Journalism12—​moved away from this convention in the direction of a “new type of book”—​as he himself called it, and explained that such a book is “designed as a whole from scratch, from the beginning to the end”, and is “characterised by original concept, structure and construction”.13 Kapuściński considered Cesarz (1978)14 to be his first book written in this manner. His three later books—​analysed in Chapter 5 of the present study—​The Shadow of the Sun, Imperium and Travels with Herodotus—​were all designed as wholes from scratch and were all original structurally. Kapuściński himself thought that he was entering with them a new territory between journalism and fiction. From the perspective of Anglophone critics, scholars and readers they are all ‘travel books’, but—​as we have seen—​there does not exist in Polish contemporary literature a generic concept equivalent to the travel book. Let us take Travels with Herodotus, Kapuściński’s final book, as an example of this generic confusion. The majority of Polish critics and scholars agree on the book’s “generic heterogeneity”.15 According to Bogdan Wróblewski, it contains elements of such genres as travel accounts, autobiography, memoirs, reportage and essay, and may be considered one large essay with shorter reportage forms inserted in it.16 Barbara Nowacka called Kapuściński’s writings “magic journalism” (“magiczne dziennikarstwo”) and insisted that Kapuściński did not transcend the boundary between literature and journalism but annulled it.17 According to Kalina Grzegorczyk, the process of ‘subjectivisation’ in Travels with Herodotus is so advanced that the book becomes “an autobiographical text” 12

Ryszard Kapuściński, Ryszard. To nie jest zawód dla cyników: Pięć zmysłów dziennikarza, Warszawa: Literatura Faktu pwn, 2013, 73–​74. 13 Kapuściński, To nie jest zawód dla cyników, 73. 14 Translated into English as The Emperor, first published in 1983: Ryszard Kapuściński, The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, transl. William R. Brandt and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-​ Brandt, New York. 15 See, e.g., Michał Kaczmarek, “Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego dyferencjacje pamięci: reporter, pisarz, dziejopis, podróżnik”, Ruch Literacki, 2017 (5), 1. 16 Bogdan Wróblewski, “Życie jest z przenikania …”, in „Życie jest z przenikania …”, ed. B. Wróblewski, Warszawa: piw, 2008, 6. 17 Barbara Nowacka, Magiczne dziennikarstwo. Ryszard Kapuściński w oczach krytyków, Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2004, 23.

204 Conclusion (“utwór autobiograficzny”),18 while in the very title of her paper she calls Travels with Herodotus “non-​canonical reportage” (“niekanoniczny reportaż”).19 Thus, the very lack of an ‘anchoring genre’ like the Anglophone travel book means that Polish researchers, after agreeing on the generic hybridity of texts like Travels with Herodotus, try either to place them on the periphery of such genres as reportage or autobiography, or postulate a new, unique, and quite nebulous category like “magic journalism”. The generic situation of Iwaszkiewicz’s Podróże do Włoch is also precarious and uncertain, but for different reasons than Travels with Herodotus. Kapuściński’s Travels with Herodotus, because of the journalistic background of the author, is to a certain extent embedded in the tradition of the reportaż podróżniczy. In fact Grzegorczyk called Travels with Herodotus a “non-​canonical reportage”, while Podróże do Włoch would be called reportaż podróżniczy only by those ‘radical’ scholars, like Niedzielski or Rejter, who wanted to extend the meaning of this term to cover all non-​fiction referential travel accounts. Such a taxonomy is opposed by scholars like Kozicka, who point to the fact that texts like Podróże do Włoch should not be called reportaż podróżniczy, but instead belong to a different category/​genre of podróż intelektualna. However, if we were to agree with Kozicka, we would be facing some new dilemmas. First of all, it would be difficult in many cases to draw a clear border between the two terms; for example such non-​canonical reportages as Kapuściński’s Travels with Herodotus—​because of this‘artistic language’, literary paratexts, and philosophical musings—​could easily be considered as belonging to the opposite category of podróż intelektualna. Moreover, one would have to consider the problem of whether all non-​fiction referential travel narratives written in Polish are either reportaż podróżniczy or podróż intelektualna, or if we should add more sub-​genres like, for example, podróż przygodowa (adventure travel)—​a type of travel narrative popular these days, written mostly by non-​professional writers with no journalistic backgrounds who decide to write accounts of their travels focusing not on their skills as reporters or artists, but on their ‘adventures’ as backpackers, cyclists or motor-​cyclists, in some more or less exotic locations.

…

18 Kalina Grzegorczyk, “Niekanoniczny reportaż:  Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego Podróże z Herodotem, Annales Universitatae Pedagogica Cracoviensis, Studia Poetica I,” 2013, 161. 19 Grzegorczyk, “Niekanoniczny reportaż”, 158–​169.

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Tim Youngs, in the penultimate chapter of his Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, while discussing the issue of the role of “editorial interventions and interpretations” remarked that: “[o]‌ther elements to consider in the reading of travel writing include aesthetics, audience, gender, genre, ideology, journey, landscape, language, motive, narrator, Otherness, period, place, plot, sexuality, textual status and translation”.20 From this perspective genre is just one of many factors to consider while critically approaching travel writing.21 And unlike, for example, ideology, genre, from the Anglophone perspective does not appear particularly troublesome. Critics and scholars of Anglophone travel writing disagree about the generic nature of travel writing. Some, like Raban, Thompson, or Youngs, treat it as a genre; others like Borm or myself, postulate that it is a suprageneric category which includes in itself the genre of the travel book. Ultimately, however, because ‘travel writing’ as conceived by the former group of scholars, and ‘travel book’ as conceived by the latter (at least in the context of contemporary literature) are to a large extent synonymous, as they both denote predominantly non-​fiction first person referential travel narratives, the ‘generic horizon of expectations’ of which is relatively stable—​ particularly when we behold it from the perspective of the ‘comparative bridge’ with Polish travel writing. It is the new, developing technologies, particularly audiobooks and the internet, with such sites as travelblog.org,22 that already influence the ways in which travellers represent their travel experiences, and will probably effect the ways in which travel books will be constructed and embellished in the future. The genre will probably endure, although other causes for such changes and their directions remain uncertain. As Tim Youngs has recently asserted: “[r]‌epeated questions about the death of travel writing attest to its respiration and adaptability”.23 The situation of Polish travel writing is slightly different. Of course, the new technologies will also influence it, but the key issue remains how the generic debate will develop. At present the situation is quite confusing. The generic term podróż’ virtually disappeared in the second half of the nineteenth century. During this period listy z podróży and kartki z podróży emerged as a narrower category including travel accounts usually published first in newspapers and 20 Youngs, Travel Writing, 167. 21 One may argue, though, that the issues of genres are in some way connected with all of the elements enumerated by Youngs, and intricately, deeply connected with quite a few of them, such as aesthetics, language, motive, narrator, plot, textual status or translation. 22 See https://​www.travelblog.org/​, last accessed 18.04.2019. 23 Youngs, “Travel Writing after 1900”, 139.

206 Conclusion magazines; focused on dividing these accounts into small chunks, appropriate as individual, separate instalments in periodicals. Listy z podróży and kartki z podróży were then replaced in the first decades of the twentieth century by the reportaż podróżniczy, a genre with a clearly journalistic background and ideological (left wing) aspirations. It was in the inter-​war period that the term reportaż podróżniczy started to be used in a broader sense, to also cover earlier travel accounts, including those written long before terms like reportaż and reporter were coined.24 In the period after World War ii critics like Czesław Niedzielski used the term reportaż podróżniczy to refer to all referential first person travel narratives. Others, like Dorota Kozicka, have argued that those travel accounts which lack the clear journalistic focus of a reportage should not be included in the category of reportaż podróżniczy and should rather be regarded as podróże intelektualne; while the majority of travel writing scholars, critics and authors have opted to solve this generic puzzle by using general terms like relacja z podrózy (travel account), or its synonyms, which, of course, has created even more generic confusion. Meanwhile, referential non-​fiction travel accounts have become more and more popular, both with writers and with readers. Internet booksellers have coped with this confusing situation by using the term ‘książki podróżnicze’ (travel books) or ‘literatura podróżnicza’ (travel literature) to keep them together under one label.25 However, these potentially useful terms have so far been ignored by travel writing scholars and critics. Despite these generic perturbations and differences, there is, however, much more that unites travel writing traditions, such as the Anglophone, Polish and other European as well as non-​European ones. This is the result of the extensive contact among these traditions achieved thanks to cultural exchange of which literary translations form the central part. Translations have been crucial for the development of travel writing within all literary traditions at least since the period of geographical discovery. Marco Polo’s Travels and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville were the first travel narratives to be translated into various European languages and to be considered canonical. They were followed by such travel accounts as Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey through France and Italy or Wolfgang von Goethe’s Italienische Reise. Susan Bassnett, who has been instrumental in the development of both travel writing studies and translation studies, has recently stated: 24 25

See Wat, “Reportaż jako rodzaj literacki”. See, e.g., https://​bonito.pl/​l-​1729-​0-​literatura-​podroznicza, last accessed 27.04.2020.

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Travel writing is a shape-​changing genre that has gone through all sorts of textual transformations as writers have catered for changing readerly expectations, and the diffusion of much travel writing, from Herodotus to Ryszard Kapuściński, has been dependent on their works being translated, hence reshaped according to the demands of target readership.26 Therefore, for Bassnett the history of travel writing is inextricably connected with the history of translation of travel narratives. The two authors she chose to represent as ‘symbolic’ for this process in the diachronic perspective are Herodotus and Ryszard Kapuściński. Of course, the one book which she took to be her synecdoche is Kapuściński’s Travels with Herodotus. This is also the book which has been crucial for the present study, although for a different set of reasons and from different perspectives. More than twenty centuries separate the writings of Herodotus and the Polish translation of the work which Ryszard Kapuściński, a young Polish reporter, received from his boss as a present before his first journey. About half a century separate Kapuściński’s first journey with a copy of Herodotus in his suitcase and Kapuściński, an experienced writer, deciding to use Herodotus as his hypotext for his memoir book of travels. Yet, as I have tried to show in this book, there are many generic issues, crucial for Polish, Anglophone and European travel writing, which influenced the final structure and format of Travel with Herodotus; and Kapuściński travelled on a long generic road from his early reportaże podróżnicze to his complex summa. Kapuściński’s travel writing may serve as an example of both the uniqueness of Polish reportaż podróżniczy—​as it has developed over the last century—​ and of the capacity of Anglophone travel writers—​such as Bruce Chatwin or V.S. Naipaul—​to creatively influence their colleagues, who write in different literary traditions. The generic comparison of Polish and Anglophone travel writing reveals two rich and varied traditions developing dynamically ever since the period of the early Reneissance in manner partly parallel, but at the same time, distinctly diverse. 26

Bassnett, Susan, “Translation and Travel Writing”, in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs, Cambridge, 2019, 564.

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222 Works Cited Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, The Turkish Embassy Letters, [1763], intro. Anita Desai, London:Virago, 1994. Wroczyński, Tomasz, Późna eseistyka Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytet Warszawskiego, 1990. Wróblewski, Bogdan, “Życie jest z przenikania …”, in Życie jest z przenikania …, ed. Bogdan Wróblewski, Warszawa: piw, 2008, 6. Youngs, Tim and Charles Forsdick, “Introduction” in Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol I (The Production of Travel Writing), ed. Tim Youngs and Charles Forsdick, London and New York: Routledge, 2012, 1–​24. Youngs, Tim, The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013. Youngs, Tim, “Travel Writing after 1900”, in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 125–​139. Zabel, Marten Dauween, “Introduction” in Henry James, The Art of Travel: Scenes and Journey in America, England, France and Italy from the Travel Writings of Henry James, ed. and intro, Morton Dauwen Zabel, Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. Zaworska, Helena, Sztuka podróżowania: Poetyckie mity podróży w twórczości Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza, Juliana Przybosia i Stanisława Różewicza, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1980. Zdanski, Clarice, “Samuel Butler, Local Identity, and the Periodizing of Northern Italian Art: The Travel Writer-​Painter’s View of Art History”, in Samuel Butler, Victorian Art Against the Grain: A Critical Overview, ed. James G. Paradise, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, 223–​250. Zdunik, Jan “Reportaż w stanie dekonstrukcji: O Życie w dżungli Zbigniewa Uniłowskiego”, Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-​Skłodowska, vol. xxxiii, 2015, 265–​283. Zinkow, Leszek, “U początków polskiego reportażu—​Maurycy Mann”, Rocznik Historii Prasy Polski.

Index Adams, Percy G. 3–​4n, 39–​40n91, 45–​46, 68–​69n73, 78 Addison, Joseph 57–​58 Alps 97–​98, 106–​107, 115–​116, 169 apopempticon 51 Arezzo 47–​48, 182–​183 ars apodemica 5–​6, 58, 60n51 Ascherson, Neal 164 Aschlieman, M.D. 182 Ash, Timothy Garton 164–​165 Auden, W.H. 180, 201 Ausonius, Decimus Magnus 51–​52 Austria 28–​29, 48–​49, 86, 126–​127, 168, 178–​179 autobiographical pact 30, 73 autobiography 3, 28–​30, 41, 42, 73, 86, 153–​154, 190, 200, 203–​204 Bach, Johann Sebastian 182 Baedeker guidebook 112, 115, 168, 171–​172, 174 Baedeker, Karl 115, 171–​172 Bacon, Francis 60–​61 Baker-​Smith, Dominic 53–​55 Bakhtin, Mikhail 27–​28, 37–​38, 41–​42, 134–​135 Balzac, Honoré de 174 Barry, Peter 18–​19n26 Batten, Jr., Charles L. 16–​18n22, 63–​64n60, 74, 92–​93, 141 Bayard, Taylor 201–​202n6 Beckford, William 35–​36, 60–​61, 73, 97, 99–​100, 102–​103, 169, 174 Dreams and the Waking Thoughts and Incidents 60–​61 Belorussia 48–​49, 160 Bennet, Betty T. 85–​86n44 Beowulf 47–​48 Belloc, Hilaire 112, 117 The Path to Rome 117 Berenson, Bernard 182, 193–​194 Berlin 105–​106, 127 Belgium 31–​33, 116, 156, 168, 178 See also Brussels Bildungsroman 16–​17, 125 Bird, Isabella 85–​86, 122

Blake, William 44 Bohls, Elizabeth A. 83 Borm, Jan 2–​3, 12–​16, 26–​27n53, 39–​40, 44, 152–​153, 201–​202, 205 Borrow, George 174 Borzymowski, Marcin 62–​63 Boswell, James 60–​61, 81–​82, 84–​85 Bracewell, Wendy 36 Breughel, Pieter(the Elder) 173–​180 Bratuń, Marek 59–​60 Braudy, Leo 73–​74 Brekke, Tom 112 Browning, Robert 123 Bruce, James 43–​44 Brussels 178, 189 Bryson, Bill 201–​202 Bunyan, John 16–​17, 117 Burke, Edmund 83–​85n41 Burkot, Stanisław 2–​3, 21n37, 22, 30, 86–​91, 95–​96, 107, 110 Burney, Charles 174 Burton, Richard 43–​44, 92, 112, 115, 136–​137, 141–​142 Butler, Samuel 112, 115–​117, 169 Alps and Sanctuaries 115, 169 Buzard, James 60–​61, 101–​102, 111–​112, 114, 132–​134, 169 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 35–​36, 60–​61, 95, 100–​104, 106, 111–​112, 116, 123, 169, 174, 198 Byron, Robert 118, 120, 145, 150–​151 Bystroń, Jan 87, 87n47 Campbell, Mary Baine 15–​16, 39–​41, 65–​66 Cavalier’s Tour 58–​59 Celtis, Conrad 50–​51, 50–​51n14 Chateaubriand, François-​René 35–​36, 96, 103–​104, 123, 197–​198 Itinéraire de Paris a Jérusalem 35–​36, 103–​104, 198 Chatwin, Bruce 39–​40, 73, 163, 165–​166, 201–​202 Chaucer, Geoffrey 47, 53n21, 120–​121 Chirico, David 36 Chytraeus, Natan 51–​52

224 Index Clark, Kenneth 182 Claude glass 79–​80 Coleridge, Samuel T. 42–​43, 95 Colletta, Lisa 60–​61, 167 Cologne 83 Columbus, Christopher 47–​48 Combe, William 80–​81n31 Commonwealth of Two Nations 48–​49, 86 Conrad, Joseph 137–​138 Copenhagen 189 Coryate, Thomas 66–​68, 117, 132–​134 Coryat’s Crudities 66–​68, 132–​134 Croce, Benedetto 196 Cromwell, Olivier 48–​49 crónica de viaje 4–​5, 36–​37, 140 Cruise, Nicholas 201–​202 Curley, Thomas M. 81–​82n36 Czermińska, Małgorzata 30, 30n67 Dampier, William 15–​16, 69, 115 Dante Alighieri 182 Danube 151, 165–​166 Dalrymple, William 201–​202 Darlington, Robert 60 Davidson, Robyn 201–​202 Defoe, Daniel 61–​62, 70–​73, 124–​125 Robinson Crusoe 42–​43, 69–​73, 124–​125n82 Dickens, Charles 112–​115, 124–​126, 197–​198 Denmark 74, 84–85 See also Copenhagen Domosławski, Artur 164–​165 Donne, John 66–​67 Doughty, Charles M. 115, 118, 120–​122 Travels in Arabia Deserta 120–​122 Drace-​Francis, Alex 36, 53–​55n22 Drayton, Michael 66–​67 Drohojewski, Józef 88–​89, 103–​104 Dryden, John 66–​67 Duff, Donald 37–​38 Duncan, Ian 83 Dybiec, Joanna 94 Dygasiński, Adolf 140 Eden, Richard 63–​64 Egeria 15–​16, 66 Itinerarium Egeriae 2–​3, 15–​16, 39–​41, 47–​48, 66

Egypt 21, 31–​33, 56–​57, 61, 87–​91, 94, 149 El Dorado 65–​66 England 47–​50, 53–​56, 60, 63–​64, 68–​69, 71–​72, 82–​86, 90, 96, 101, 111–​112, 114, 123, 137 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 123–​124 epibaterion 51–​52 family resemblance 14, 40 Felsenstein, Frank 76 Fermor, Patrick Leigh vii, 6, 121, 145–​154, 162–​164, 197–​198, 201–​203,  A Time of Gifts 146–​152, 151–​152n13, 162, 201–​203 Fielding, Henry 2–​3, 15–​18, 42–​43, 67–​68, 70–​76, 78–​79, 81–​82, 91, 93–​94, 97–​99, 103, 124–​125, 130, 132–​134, 141, 200 The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon 15–​18, 68, 71–​73 Fielding, Xan 146–​147 Flakkus, Valerius 51–​52 Forsdick, Charles 12–​13, 41–​43, 73 Forster, George  France 3, 15–​16, 31–​33, 35–​36, 41, 48–​49, 60–​62, 66–​68, 71, 75–​83, 89–​90, 96–​98, 100–​103, 116–​117, 123, 132–​134, 156, 168, 171, 178, 198–​199, 206–​207 See also Paris Frow, John 1–​2, 17, 37–​38, 41–​42 Frye, Northrop 37–​38 Fussell, Paul 1, 18n22, 38n87, 42–​43, 118, 120 Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars 1, 18n22, 42–​43, 118, 120 Gammurini, G.F. 47–​48 Gautier, Théophile 123–​124, 197–​198 Gdańsk (Danzig) 48–​49, 62–​63, 86, 158–​159 generic hybridity 1, 16, 203–​204 Genette, Gérard 37–​38, 162 Gilbert, Elizabeth 167 Gilbert, Humphrey 63 Gilpin, William 79–​80 Giotto di Bondone 173–​175, 177 Goethe, Wolfgang von 35–​36, 96–​97, 100, 123, 173, 183–​185, 197–​198, 206 Italianische Reise 29–​30n65, 35–​36, 96–​97 Graham, Mary 43–​44

225

Index Grand Tour 5–​6, 31–​33, 57–​61, 76, 80–​81, 93–​94, 97, 101–​103, 116, 123, 131–​134, 167–​199 Great Britain 71–​72, 86 See also England; London; Scotland; Wales Greene, Graham 120, 201n4 Grzegorczyk, Kalina 203–​204 Hakluyt, Richard 39–​40, 63–​64 Hardy, Thomas 117 Hazlitt, William 169 Herbert, George 151 Herbert, Zbigniew 28–​29 Hester, Nathalie C. 36–​37 hodoeporicon 23, 50–​53 Holland, Patrick 201–​202 Holy Land 50–​51, 50–​51n12, 61–​62, 86–​89, 103–​104, 198 Home Tour 80, 93–​94, 97, 102–​104, 187–​189 Homer 2, 50, 50n10, 62–​63  Iliad 63 Odyssey 2, 62–​63 Hooke, Robert 68–​69 Hooper, Glenn 12–​13 Horace 15–​16, 50–​55, 92–​93, 151–​153 horizon of expectations 1–​4, 40–​42, 200–​201, 205 Howells, William Dean 123–​124 Huggan, Graham 201–​202 Humboldt, Alexander von 43–​44, 93–​94, 141 Huneberc 50–​51 Huxley, Aldous 6, 60–​61, 116, 121, 167–​184, 194, 197–​203 Along the Road 6, 167–​184, 197–​198, 200–​203 Imlay, Gilbert 84–​85 Irzykowski, Karol 25, 154 Italy 3, 6, 15–​16, 22, 28–​29, 31–​33, 35–​36, 42–​43, 52–​53, 57–​58, 60–​62, 66–​68, 71, 75, 78–​85, 90, 113–​115, 123, 131–​134, 165–​169, 171, 174, 178, 183–​193, 195–​197, 206–​207 See also Rome 52–​53, 56–​57, 60, 75, 77, 101–​102, 117, 127, 132–​134, 148, 171, 185–​187, 192–​193, 195, Sicily; Venice Isherwood, Christopher 201 Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław 6, 22, 28–​30n65, 60–​61, 167–​169, 183–​199, 202–​204

Podróże do Włoch 6, 22, 28–​30n65, 167–​169, 183–​184, 202–​204 James, Henry 122–​124, 140–​141 James I of England 66–​67, 120–​121 Jameson, Ann 115 Janicjusz, Klemens (Clemens Ianicius)  52–​53 Jauss, Hans Robert 1–​2, 37–​38 Jerome, Saint 50–​51 Johnson, Donald 57 Johnson, Samuel 16–​18, 57, 73, 81–​82, 84–​85 Jourdin, Michel Mollat du 33–​34 Joyce, James 150 Kaliszewski, Julian Klin 132–​134, 132–​134n95 Kapuściński, Ryszard, PE2/​P3 6, 25–​27, 145–​146, 153–​166, 197–​198, 202–​204, 207 Imperium 6, 153–​154, 159–​160, 162–​163, 165–​166, 202–​203 Travels with Herodotus 6, 153–​154, 159–​163, 165–​166, 202–​203, 207 kartki z podróży 3–​6, 31, 97–​98, 131–​132, 134–​135, 139, 154, 198–​199, 205–​206 Kazania Świętokrzyskie 47 Keats, John 95 Kempe, Margery 47–​48 Kinglake, Alexander William 73, 118–​120, 118–​119n62, 121–​122, 145 Eōthen 118–​120, 118–​119n62, 145 Kingsley, Mary 43–​44, 85–​86, 121–​122 Kipling, Rudyard 112 Kochanowski, Jan 53, 53n21, 62–​63 Kopernik, Mikołaj (Nicolaus Copernicus) 52–​53 Konopnicka, Maria 140 Korte, Barbara 18, 33–​36, 43–​44, 74, 201n5 Korwin, Wawrzyniec (Laurentius Corvinus Novoforensis, Lorenz Rabe) 52–​53 Kowalczyk, Andrzej S. 30 Kozicka, Dorota 29–​30, 29–​30n65, 185, 189–​191, 198, 204, 206 Königsberg 107–​108 Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy 3–​4, 20, 22, 20n31, 31–​33, 94

226 Index Krzywy, Roman, PE2.P2 23, 33–​34, 60n51 Kuprel, Diana 164 Lassels, Richard 58, 60 Leask, Nigel 43–​44, 93–​94, 93n59, 97, 141–​142 Leibetseder, Matis 59 Lejeune, Phillipe 30, 73 Lindsay, Claire 36–​37 listy z podróży 3–​4, 24, 27–​28, 31–​33, 134–​136, 140, 154, 205–​206 Lithuania 48–​49, 127–​128, 155n20 Livingstone, David 43–​44, 92, 115, 136–​137, 141–​142 London 16, 60, 66, 68–​69, 108–​109, 113–​114, 132–​134, 149, 175 Lublin 48–​49 Luft, D.S. 30 Macpherson, James 81–​82 Madrid 127, 178 Magris, Claudio 165–​166 Malinowska, Elżbieta 27–​28 Mancall, Peter 63–​64 Mann, Maurycy 21, 87–​88 maps 55n32, 63, 90, 101–​102, 109, 115, 117, 120, 138, 155–​156, 200 Matthias, Catharine 33–​34 McKeon, Michael 15–​16, 68–​69 Mee, John 84 Middle East 21, 86–​87 Mieszkowski, Piotr 59 Mirkowicz, Tomasz 87–​88 Mississippi River 118–​119 Montagu, Mary Wortley 82, 105–​106, 174 More, Thomas 53–​55 Utopia 53–​55 Morris, Jan 34–​35, 201–​202 Moryson, Fynes 60 Murray’s handbooks 101–​103, 112–​116, 171, 173–​174 Murray, John 101–​102, 113–​114, 171 Naipaul, V.S. 98–​99, 163, 207 narrative persona 3–​4, 15–​16, 18, 52–​55, 62–​65, 68, 71–​72, 74–​79, 89, 91–​94, 97, 99–​100, 106–​107, 112–​115, 117, 119, 121–​122, 124–​125, 127, 130–​141, 146–​152, 157–​163, 169–​173, 179–​180, 182–​184, 189–​193, 195, 197, 200–​202

Nerval, Gérard de 96 Netherlands (Holland) 22, 48–​49, 66–​67, 82, 97–​98, 100–​101, 146–​147, 150–​151, 174–​175 Newby, Eric 34–​35, 201–​202 Niedzielski, Czesław 2–​5, 18–​21, 20n30, 22–​23, 28–​29, 45–​46, 139–​140, 198, 204, 206 Niemcewicz, Julian Ursyn 88–​89, 94 Nowacka, Barbara 164–​165, 203–​204 Norway 74, 84–​86 O’Hanlon, Redmond 201–​202 Orzeszkowa, Eliza 31–​33 Ottoman Empire 55–​57, 82, 86–​87, 104–​106, 104–​105n27 Ovid 51–​53 Paris 35–​36, 60, 77, 103–​104, 107–​108, 127, 139, 171, 178, 198 Park, Mungo 92, 97, 99 Passin, Hans-​Joachim 16–​18 Patnir, Joachim 179 Paul, Saint 50–​51, 178 Petancius, Felix 51–​52 picturesque aesthetics 79–​81, 84–​85n41, 98–​99, 102–​104, 110, 186–​187 Piechota, Magdalena 24 Piero della Francesca 180–​182 Piotrowski, Rufin 107–​110 podróż (as a genre) 1–​6, 15, 18–​20, 22–​23n40, 28–​33, 35, 40–​42n99, 69, 87–​90, 94, 96–​98, 103–​107, 110–​111, 124, 127–​128, 131–​132, 139, 145–​146, 154, 197–​199, 205–​206 See also podróż artystyczna, podróż intelektualna podróż artystyczna (as a subgenre) 29–​30 podróże intelektualne (as a subgenre) 4–​5, 28–​30, 198, 204, 206 Poland 18–​19, 24–​25, 48–​49, 56, 86, 96, 103–​109, 124–​129, 135–​137, 140, 155–​156, 160, 187–​190, 193, 195–​197 See also Gdańsk; Lublin; Toruń, Warszawa Polezzi, Loredana 5, 36–​37, 41, 165–​166 Polo, Marco 47–​48, 89, 206–​207 Potocki, Jan (Jean Potocki) 22, 88–​91, 94, 103 Pratt, Marie Louise 11n75, 18, 33–​34, 43–​44, 68, 74, 93–​94, 112

227

Index Pritchard, R.E. 66–​67 propemticon 51 Prus, Bolesław 139 Prussia 48–​49, 52–​53, 86, 107–​108, 126–​127, 135, 155–​156 See also Königsberg Pruszyński, Ksawery 25, 152, 154, 156–​158 Pryce-​Jones, Alan 200–​201 Purchas, Samuel 63–​64 Pyrckmair, Hilarius 59 Raban, Jonathan 15, 38, 38n87, 73, 118–​120, 145, 202 racism 137–​138 Radcliffe, Ann 82–​84, 124–​125 Radziwiłł, Mikołaj Krzysztof (Sierotka)  61–​62, 87–​88, 87n47, 90 Raleigh, Walter 16, 40–​41, 64–​68 The Discoverie of Guyana 16, 40–​41, 64–​68 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista 63–​64 récit de voyage 15, 31, 38–​40n91 referential pact 42–​43, 73 relacja z podróży (as a literary subgenre) 22, 25, 28–​30, 206 Rejter, Artur 4–​5, 25–​28, 42, 198, 204 reportaż podróżniczy 3–​7, 21–​29, 31–​33, 42, 44, 110–​111, 135, 139–​140, 154–​155, 158, 164, 198, 202–​207 Reusner, Nicolaus 51–​52 Reymont, Władysław 139–​140 Rogers, Samuel 169 Robinson, Ralph 53–​55 Roman Empire 105–​106, 117 Rosenberg, Ruth 89–​90, 96, 112 Rosenberg, Sonia 17 Rott, Dariusz 27–​28, 42 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacque 90–​91, 124–​125, Rubiés, Joan-​Pau 12–​16 Russell, John 182 Russia 48–​49, 86, 104–​105, 107–​109, 126–​127, 135, 152 See also Siberia, Soviet Union Rybiński, Jan (Johannes Rybinius) 52–​53 Ryle, John 164–​165

Sarbiewski, Maciej Kazimierz (Mathias Casimirius Sarbievius) 50–​53 Scaliger, Julius Caeser (Giulio Cesare della Scalla) 50–​52 Scandinavia 84–​85 Schweizer, Bernard 201n4 Scotland 71–​72, 81, 84–​85 Sell, Jonathan 34–​35, 43–​44, 56–​57, 66, 69 Seward, Ann 81 Shakespeare, William 146, 182, 192–​193 Shelley, Percy B. 95, 97–​98 Shelley, Mary 85–​86, 97–​98, 121–​122 Siberia 103, 107–​110 Sienkiewicz, Henryk 4, 22, 24, 31–​33, 124–​126, 132, 134–​136, 156–​157, 197–​198 Listy z podróży do Ameryki 24, 28, 134–​136 Sitwell, Osbert 200–​201 Sławek, Tadeusz 44–​45 Sławiński, Janusz 38, 38n45 Smollett, Tobias 3, 15–​18, 42–​43, 60–​62, 67–​68, 73, 75–​79, 84–​85, 90, 97, 130, 141 Travels through France and Italy 15–​17, 42–​43, 61–​62, 68, 71–​72, 75, 78, 84–​85, 90 Soderini, Piero 55, 55n31 Soviet Union  Staël, Germain de 61, 96 Stanley, H.M. 92, 136–​137, 141–​142 Stagl, Justin 59–​60 Steinbeck, John 92–​94 Travels with Charley 92–​93 Stempowski, Jerzy 28–​29 Stendhal, Marie-​Henri Beyle 96, 123, 174 Sterne, Laurence 3, 29–​30n65, 35–​36, 60–​61, 67–​68, 73–​74, 77–​79, 97, 101, 117, 123–​124, 132–​134, 198, 201–​202, 206–​207 A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy 3, 29–​30n65, 35–​36, 77–​79, 101, 132–​134, 198, 206–​207 Stevenson, Robert Louis 112, 116, 116n57, 156 Stigelius, Ioannes 51–​52 Sweden 48–​49, 62–​63, 74, 84–​86, 90 Switzerland 97–​98, 115 Symmonds, John Addington 182 Sztachelska, Jolanta 24, 130–​132, 139–​140

Said, Edward 1 Sandys, George 56–​57 Sapieha, Aleksander 88–​89

terza pagina 4–​5, 36–​37, 140 Theroux, Paul 34–​35, 163 Thicknesse, Philip 77–​79, 111–​112

228 Index Thompson, Carl 2–​3, 6–​7, 11, 13–​14n8, 40–​41, 40–​41n96, 43–​44, 63–​64n60, 74, 78–​79, 91–​92, 95–​96, 121–​122, 141, 205 Thouroude, Guillaume 38–​40 Thubron, Colin 153, 201–​202 Todorov, Tzvetan 37–​38 Toruń (Thorn) 48–​49 translation 5, 31–​33, 41, 47–​48, 50n10, 53–​55, 57, 61–​62, 94, 105–​108, 110, 124–​125, 158–​160, 162, 165–​166, 205, 205–​207 travel book 1–​7, 12–​13, 15–​16, 15–​16n14, 18, 20n31, 30, 35–​36, 38–​44, 57, 66–​71, 73–​75, 77–​86, 89–​90, 93–​125, 135–​136, 140–​142, 145–​147, 152–​154, 164, 166, 169, 174, 184–​185, 197–​198, 200–​206 Travels of Sir John Mandaville 2–​3, 25, 25n46, 47–​48, 206–​207 Treter, Tomasz 61–​62, 87, 90 Trollope, Anthony 97, 112, 114–​115, 114n53, 116, 124–​126 Trollope, Frances 98–​99, 98–​99n9, 113–​115 Turler, Hieronymus 59 Turner, Catherine 76 Turner, Paul 53–​55 Twain, Mark 112, 118–​119, 132–​134, 169 The Innocents Abroad 112, 132–​134, 169 U.S.A. 135, 156–​157 Uniłowski, Zbigniew 22, 154, 157 Urbański, Piotr 50 Venuti, Lawrence 165–​166 Veuillot, Charles 174 Vespucci, Amerigo 55, 55n31, 55n32 voyages and travels 2–​3, 17–​18, 35, 39–​43, 47–​48, 63, 63–​64n60, 71–​72, 141

Viëtor, Karl 38–​39 Virgil 62–​63, 67, 151–​152 Walachia 48–​49 Waldsemüller, Martin 55 Wales 79 walking 117 Walpole, Horace 57 Wańkowicz, Melchior 25–​26, 154–​158, 164 Wargocki, Andrzej 61–​62 Warszawa (Warsaw) 62–​63, 88–​89, 104–​105, 108–​109, 126–​127, 135, 139–​140, 156, 161–​163, 188–​189, 191–​192 Wat, Aleksander 24–​25 Watt, Ian 15–​16, 70 Watzenrode, Łukasz (Lukas Watzenrode) 52–​53 Weschler, Lawrence 164–​165 West, Rebecca 201n4 Widsith 47–​48 Willes, Richard 63–​64 Williams, Carlos Williams 180 Willibald, Saint 50–​51, 50–​51n12 Witosz, Bożena 2, 14, 39–​40, 42, 198 Wollstonecraft, Mary 74, 84–​86, 90–​91 Woodcock, George 176–​177 Wordsworth, William 95, 100, 102–​103, 117 Wróblewski, Bogdan 203–​204 Young, Gavin 201–​202 Young, Peter 174 Youngs, Tim 6–​7, 12–​13, 15, 70–​71, 74, 83, 205 Zapolska, Gabriela 139–​140 Zbylitkowski, Andrzej 62–​63 Ziątek, Zygmunt 164–​165 Zinkow, Leszek 21, 21n7 Zwinger, Theodor 59 Zygmunt iii Waza 62–​63,