Rethinking Period Boundaries: New Approaches to Continuity and Discontinuity in Modern European History and Culture 9783110636000, 9783110632064

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Rethinking Period Boundaries

Rethinking Period Boundaries New Approaches to Continuity and Discontinuity in Modern European History and Culture Edited by Lucian George and Jade McGlynn

ISBN 978-3-11-063206-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-063600-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-063237-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930263 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. Chapter 4 “Crossing Borders and Period Boundaries in Central European Art: The Work of Anna Lesznai (ca. 1910–1930)” © Julia Secklehner © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Photographs by Karol Plicka from L.W. Rochowanski: Columbus in der Slowakei (Bratislava, 1936). Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Lucian George Introduction Periodization Challenges and Challenging Periodization: Interdisciplinary Reflections 1 Jan A. Burek Chapter 1 History Seems Different from the Shop Floor. A Micro-Historical Challenge to Established Caesurae in the History of 20th-Century Poland: Transwar Continuities in Żyrardów 35 Lucian George Chapter 2 Rumours of Re-Enserfment, Anti-Feudal Identities and “Folk Periodization”: 59 The Memory of Serfdom in Early 20th-Century Galicia Aaron Clift Chapter 3 L’homme au couteau entre les dents and Les classes dangereuses: A “Transwar” Perspective on Continuities in French Anticommunist 93 Discourse Julia Secklehner Chapter 4 Crossing Borders and Period Boundaries in Central European Art: The Work of Anna Lesznai (ca. 1910 – 1930) 119 Aleksei Lokhmatov Chapter 5 “Periodizations” in Intellectual History: On the Plurality of Continuities in the Public Debates of Post-War Poland 149 Alessia Benedetti Chapter 6 A “Product of a Certain Social Milieu” and a “Genius”: Analogies and

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Continuities between Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Debates on Dante in 175 Russia Andrea Talabér Chapter 7 Continuing Traditions: National Days in Czechoslovakia and Hungary during the 20th Century 201 Ritchie Robertson Epilogue Some Problems in Historical and Literary Periodization List of Contributors Index

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Introduction Periodization Challenges and Challenging Periodization: Interdisciplinary Reflections Newcomers to history, intent on discovering more about periodization, could easily find themselves daunted by the size of their prospective reading list. As the editors of this volume can confirm from experience, scholars intent on saying something new about the subject are likely to feel the same. Such initial anxieties, however, partly derive from an optical illusion. There is indeed a sizeable literature discussing the particular periodization schemes that have structured thinking about the past and its relationship to the present. Amongst these the Antiquity–Middle Ages–Modernity triptych is undoubtedly the most hegemonic and discussed. Plenty has also been written on the even more specific periodization schemes within the various subfields of historical study. Meanwhile, periodization “in the abstract”, as a general practice and mode of thinking unmoored from any specific manner of chunking history, is much more seldom the object of sustained theoretical or methodological reflection. Moreover (and here comes the optical illusion), titles that might lead the reader to expect such general reflection – our own is certainly guilty of this charge! – in practice often conceal studies of the first type, in which particular instances of periodization are the focus. The last book written by the great medievalist Jacques Le Goff can serve as a paradigmatic example: titled Must We Divide History into Periods?, it is in reality (and by its own admission) an argument for the recognition of “a long Middle Ages in the Christian West”.¹ A survey of the literature also reveals that, when historians write about periodization “in the abstract” (normally, that is, in the introductions to their studies of its particular instances), they usually end up rehearsing well-known arguments for and against the practice in which only their examples change. There is even an unremarked predictability to the presentation of these arguments, frequently condensed into a contrastive prose couplet, the first line of which concedes the usefulness or even necessity of periodization, whilst the second laments its artificiality. “Periodization, the process of dividing historical time Note: I wish to thank Jade McGlynn for her contributions to this chapter, as well as Chiara Ardoino, Aaron Clift and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and criticisms.  J. Le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods? (New York, 2015), p. x. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636000-001

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into periods and of labelling these periods, is essential for focusing study of the past,” the classicist Antonis Kotsonas tells us, before adding: “nevertheless, as Ian Morris explains, ‘periodization distorts’.”² Or, more pithily, as literary historian Marshall Brown put it (whilst reversing the couplet’s order): “Periods are entities we love to hate. Yet we cannot do without them.”³ The trope appears in texts from different decades (the earliest I have found is from 1953⁴) and different historical disciplines, including those like literary history where periodization as a general practice has been much more extensively discussed. Nor is the present publication without sin: the call for papers that lies at its origins also began by affirming that “periodization is an ever-present feature of the grammar of history-writing”, before complaining of how this “heuristic artifice all too easily congeals into immovable structure”. Readers can rest assured that many more examples could be found to convince (and bore) them. That such repetitive banality is tolerated in the humanities, a subculture that does not suffer overt consensus lightly, may at first be hard to understand. In reality, the explanation hides in plain sight – in the tired tango of utility and artificiality itself. As the recurrence of this couplet suggests, most historians at least nominally recognise that periodization is a fictitious projection onto the past – a consensus that has only been reinforced by the decline of stadial and philosophical models of history. On one side of this consensus there are “optimists” – the silent majority, one suspects – who think that periodization can still be useful. Their belief is usually motivated by two claims: first, that periodization is simply convenient – a claim that does not demand theoretical or methodological justification – and second, that by classifying the past in meaningful ways periodization helps foreground the most significant fault-lines and interconnections within it. In this way, periodization arms scholars with the baseline preconceptions for looking at historical data, stimulating the search for further interconnections within established periods and providing a punchbag for when the preconceptions and data do not match.⁵ Yet, where the “optimist” sees useful artifice, the periodization “pessimist” sees only artifice. In this view, periodization always obscures more than it re-

 A. Kotsonas, “Politics of Periodization and the Archaeology of Early Greece”, American Journal of Archaeology, 120/2 (2016), p. 240.  M. Brown, “Periods and Resistances”, MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 62/4 (2001), p. 309.  G. Boas, “Historical Periods”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 11/3 (1953), p. 248.  E. g., Brown, “Periods and Resistances”, p. 311.

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veals.⁶ Having conceded that periodization is a fiction, however, the “optimist” can only respond by repeating the familiar utility-based mantra. Anything else would prove the “pessimist” right. It is no use, for instance, to try and develop a periodizing methodology that could be applied across time and to all historical phenomena.⁷ This would risk turning a heuristic into an endpoint and suggest that an organising structure intended as partial and contestable, in fact, seeks to have the final word. Once periodization has been reduced to a heuristic fiction without a universal method, there is also not much point trying to theorise its core principles. In this diluted form, there is nothing fundamentally to distinguish periodization from historical interpretation in general: a way of thinking that looks for patterns and differences in the past, makes claims about their relative significance and places them within a larger temporal narrative. At this point, having accepted the dissolution of that which they are defending, “optimists” who would like to say something new about periodization “in the abstract” will find themselves truly cornered. That no stronger argument in favour of periodization can be found, even as criticisms of it can be multiplied, condemns the defence of periodization to paralysis – and thus, the perpetuum mobile of utility vs artificiality might begin to look rather favourable after all. Luckily for historians, the very reasons that make periodization “in the abstract” so sterile are also what make it a self-replenishing source of debate “in the particular”. If particular periodization schemes can never be comprehensive, then they will always leave things out, thereby setting the grounds for their own contestation. If their emphases and erasures are by definition non-neutral, then their premises can always be questioned. Moreover, if the value of any given periodization is merely heuristic, then its usefulness lasts only so long as it provokes more insight than it obstructs. By implication, every time a new research

 E. g., M. Mattix, “Periodization and Difference”, New Literary History, 35/4 (2004), pp. 685 – 697; E. Hayot, “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time”, New Literary History, 42/4 (2011), pp. 739 – 756.  This is not to say that scholars never propose ways for periodizing history that might have more global applications across time and space. Jerry Bentley’s proposed periodization of world history on the basis of cross-cultural interaction offers a case in point. Nevertheless, though his ambitions are global, Bentley does not at any point claim that this periodization scheme is meant to be total: the methodology he proposes remains a provisional one, designed to increase the visibility of certain important phenomena and not to arrive at a definitive classificatory framework for all history. J. H. Bentley, “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History”, American Historical Review, 101/3 (1996), pp. 750 – 751.

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question is asked, existing models of periodization are subjected to scrutiny.⁸ Even when a periodization scheme appears to endure, the calm of the surface can conceal contestation below, as periods are subdivided, boundaries shifted and the presumed characteristics of given periods debated.⁹ Finally, if periodization is not qualitatively discontinuous from historical interpretation more generally, then every new interpretation that rejects the primacy of one caesura/continuity by highlighting another – even if on a much smaller scale and with less totalising intent – is itself an implicit act of periodization, which is open to contestation, whose premises can be questioned, and so on and so forth. The conviction that periods and period boundaries are always there to be rethought and that their rethinking is always timely provides part of the justification for the present volume – a collection of case studies on modern European history and culture, all of which seek to problematise existing paradigms of periodization.¹⁰ The case studies roam from the early 19th to the late 20th century and cover almost the full breadth – if not quite the length – of the continent, from France to Russia, but with a particular focus on East-Central Europe. This limited geographical and chronological focus contrasts with the volume’s diversity of disciplinary orientation, with chapters addressing questions drawn from social, cultural, intellectual, literary, labour and art history. The chapters also present a diversity of scale. Some zoom in on the decades adjacent to important historical boundaries – especially those of 1917– 1918 and 1945 – in order to probe for signs of porosity within these boundaries. Others zoom out, looking to survey periodization-defying continuities over the course of a century or more (whilst still remaining attentive to the smaller-scale temporal contexts in which these continuities played out¹¹). It is worth noting that all our case studies are more interested in challenging existing periodizations by uncovering continuities than in building new ones by establishing boundaries. The continuities in question pertain to a wide variety of domains, including political discourse, social organisation, national ritual, artistic style, and industrial policy. For the most part these are “etic” continuities – that is, ones which existed independent-

 Indeed, the same phenomenon can even be periodized differently depending on the research question, without this resulting in contradiction. M. Schapiro, H. W. Janson and E. Gombrich, “Criteria of Periodization in the History of European Art”, New Literary History, 1/2 (1970), p. 113.  D. Blackbourn, “‘The Horologe of Time’: Periodization in History”, PMLA, 127/2 (2012), pp. 302– 303.  Six of the chapters arose as part of a conference on periodization held in Oxford in May 2018.  For a similar approach (“serial contextualism”) to the study of the longue durée in intellectual history, see D. Armitage, “What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée”, History of European Ideas, 38/4 (2012), p. 498.

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ly of whether historical actors recognised their existence or acted upon them. A few chapters, however, also discuss “emic” continuities – in other words, continuities, be they real or imaginary, as they were perceived by historical actors and reflected in their assumptions about how the past related to the present/future. As will be shown, “emic” continuities can also pose a challenge for periodization. The four most important questions addressed by the case studies can be generalised as follows: how do dominant periodizations become problematic when historians adopt the vantage point of neglected historical actors? Can periodization be reconciled with the non-synchronicity of different historical processes? Similarly, is periodization compatible with the temporal persistence of structurally self-perpetuating sociocultural phenomena (e. g., rituals, cultural schemas, traditions) across period boundaries? Finally, what kind of continuities have dominant periodization schemes tended to ignore? Whilst individual case studies will be of primary interest to scholars from different subfields of history, there are considerable advantages to bringing them together in a single volume. For those interested in issues of historical continuity and periodization, a single volume makes it easier to showcase the diversity of strategies through which periodization can be rethought, as well as the commonalities shared by different attempts to do so, regardless of subfield. For those with a broader interest in the theory and practice of historical disciplines (from historical anthropology to literary history), it also helps to clarify the wider methodological and theoretical issues raised by the rethinking of periodization. While some of these issues are addressed head-on within the case studies, others remain more implicit. By teasing them out, this introduction aims to help readers uncover connections between the case studies as well as their wider implications. At the same time, in an effort to show how the rethinking of periodization is imbricated with other areas of scholarship, this introduction develops arguments of its own. In particular, I seek to demonstrate (i) how the rethinking of periodization dovetails with broader pluralising trends in historical disciplines, particularly the pluralisation of time (the “temporal turn”); (ii) how theoretical insights derived from the “temporal turn” can help link the rethinking of periodization to the rethinking of other historical tools, especially contextualist approaches; (iii) connectedly, how certain sociocultural phenomena possess a structural predisposition towards “atemporality” which complicates both periodization and contextualisation; and (iv) how the manner in which we periodize is determined by (usually unstated) theories of historical continuity and change. Whilst developing these arguments, I will draw on various bodies of literature, many of which are not remotely concerned with periodization but whose insights

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can still enrich the way it is practised. The overall purpose is to show how, even if periodization itself cannot be theorised, its manner of execution nevertheless depends on historical and social theory. In other words, though periodization “in the abstract” may lead to sterile discussion, doing periodization well still requires historians to reflect on their most basic assumptions and concepts.

I Periodization and the pluralisation of history It is often in the context of broader attempts to introduce plurality into history and “let the subaltern speak” that challenges to periodization can emerge.¹² The reasons for this connection are obvious enough. The canonical narratives targeted by pluralising agendas all share the same fundamental hallmark: their privileging of some historical actors and events at the expense of others.¹³ Their orientation is, in short, towards unity over diversity; it is intrinsically reductionist. Even in its softest variants, as Ritchie Robertson argues (Epilogue), the periodizing gaze has a similar bias. Consequently, when pluralising agendas try to undermine the illusory unity of the historical canon, it is easy (and often deliberate) that they take down the illusory unity of the period as well. This general correlation is borne out by many of our case studies, over half of which arrive at “re-periodization” by assuming the perspective of a group or individual actor that existing historiography in some way neglects. Whilst many such neglected actors owe their historiographical marginality to their social marginality, this is far from a necessary condition. Indeed, amongst its symbolic “subalterns”, this book counts not only the more predictable workers (Chapter 1) and peasants (Chapter 2) but also historical figures of impeccable respectability, like the various bourgeois who people Aaron Clift’s chapter and the popular cosmopolitan artist Anna Lesznai discussed by Julia Secklehner. The role of periodization’s “subaltern” can even be performed by entire nations, and hardly peripheral ones at that: as Secklehner argues, a lack of obvious avant-gardist features in the art of interwar Austria has largely resulted in its historiographical

 For a classic example see J. Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?”, in J. Kelly, Women, History & Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago, 1984), pp. 19 – 50. A critique of Kelly for not challenging periodization enough can be found in J. M. Bennett, “Confronting Continuity”, Journal of Women’s History, 9/3 (1997), pp. 73 – 94. Also see J. W. Warren and M. Dickie (eds), Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization (Athens GA, 2000).  M. Grever and S. Stuurman (eds), Beyond the Canon: History for the Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke, 2007).

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silencing, to the “benefit” of the avant-garde of much more classically “semi-peripheral” Hungary. The process whereby “margins” are erased and re-discovered, following cycles of periodization and re-periodization, can easily assume an openly political dimension. This politicisation is most evident in world history where a growing awareness of how periodization is enmeshed in dialectics of epistemic colonial violence and epistemic subaltern resistance¹⁴ has given recent debates around it a radical tenor.¹⁵ Though they deal exclusively with European contexts, some of the case studies in this volume also seek to expose politicised ways of periodizing, be it by subverting the methodological nationalism that underpins much of the art history of Central Europe (Chapter 4) or by questioning the radical discontinuities between pre- and post-1945 labour history that contemporary Polish anticommunism assumes and demands (Chapter 1). Overall, however, this is not an especially political book. In fact, I was rather surprised that, at the Oxford conference where many of our chapters were first presented, amongst 25-odd speakers from institutions all over Europe the desire to frame periodization as part of the nexus of knowledge and power was in distinctly short supply. This is not to say that a kind of frustration with the political does not find expression in what follows. Rather than focus on the politicised nature of periodization, however, this frustration is mainly targeted at how political processes in the past continue to set the default standard for all kinds of periodization. That high politics should still be perceived as having a distorting effect on historiography may appear surprising, even outdated, given how thoroughly the hegemony of political history has been undermined in the wider discipline. Nevertheless – as many of our case studies show – even if political history is no longer dominant, assumptions about the primacy of the political continue to inform scholarly expectations of change and continuity in other areas of history. This

 Less frequently remarked is how a lack of periodization might also represent a form of epistemic politics, denoting as it can assumptions of atemporal immutability – assumptions of the type frequently found in traditionalist self-mythologies and Orientalist projections onto the Other. For an example of how a lack of periodization can be perceived this way see S. D. Goitein, “A Plea for the Periodization of Islamic History”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 88/2 (1968), pp. 224– 228.  For a flavour of recent debates see the following report on a 2017 conference organised in Berlin by the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Stiftung: Milinda Banerjee, “Annual Conference: Chronologics – Periodisation in a Global Context”, https://trafo.hypotheses. org/9109 (accessed 3 May 2020). Also see T. Maissen and B. Mittler, Why China did not have a Renaissance – and why that matters: an interdisciplinary dialogue (Berlin/Boston, 2018); K. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008).

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assumed primacy is especially visible when dealing with the political caesuras challenged in this book: 1917– 1918 and 1945, caesuras which entailed political transformations with extremely broad implications for all aspects of society. However, as many of our chapters show, much can still be learnt about these undoubtedly transformative moments by remaining attentive to the possible nonsynchronism between the pretensions and proclamations of high politics, on the one hand, and other layers of historical reality, on the other. Indeed, such time lags can even concern historical actors situated in the very eye of the political storm: just as leading Bolsheviks, the political vanguard of the new society, at times seemed to ventriloquise the voices of 19th-century literary critics in their debates over cultural politics after 1917 (Chapter 6), so the strategy of some key Catholic politicians in post-1945 Poland is more easily explained by their pre-war intellectual development than by the radically new political reality to which it was in their vital interest to adapt (Chapter 5).

II Periodization and the pluralisation of time The tension between periodization, on the one hand, and the non-synchronism of different historical processes, on the other, brings us to one of the more exciting areas of contemporary historical theory, that is, the study of “temporalities”. Though it is hard to generalise about this field,¹⁶ one of its most consistent features is a desire to relativise, historicise and pluralise the notion of time. That any kind of pluralisation, let alone one of time, should constitute a threat to periodization may by this point seem self-evident to the reader. In practice, though, it is not a point that is often spelled out or that has always been intuitively understood. The mischaracterisation of the work of Reinhart Koselleck, one of the intellectual forefathers of this trend, illustrates this well. As Helge Jordheim has shown, historians in the Anglosphere have tended to use Koselleck’s writings on the emergence of a distinctively modern temporal experience (Neuzeit) to pigeonhole him as a theorist of periodization, when in reality his intellectual project, a “theory of multiple temporalities, organized in the form of temporal layers that have different origins and duration and move at different speeds, [is better conceived as] an alternative to the linear and empty time of periodization.”¹⁷

 E. g., M. S. Champion, “The History of Temporalities: An Introduction”, Past & Present, 243/1 (2019), pp. 247– 254.  H. Jordheim, “Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities”, History and Theory, 51/2 (2012), p. 170.

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As is implied in Jordheim’s argument, the idea that different times are not always synchronised – the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous” – is a natural outgrowth of the pluralisation of time. It is also an idea that presents a peculiar challenge for periodization, undermining both the neatness of temporal divisions between periods and the presumed synchronic unity that underpins any given one. Though currently associated with the “temporal turn” in history, the basic intuition that times are not synchronised has existed for considerably longer and in a variety of permutations.¹⁸ As each version of the idea has resulted in a different kind of challenge to periodization (as well as inspiring different solutions), this section will attempt a brief, selective overview. The idea of non-synchronism most likely became “thinkable” during the Enlightenment. This was when stadial understandings of history first became widespread and, thus, made it possible to interpret differences between simultaneously existing societies as a reflection of their belonging to separate temporal stages of development, in an otherwise shared human trajectory (for an excellent example of such thinking from Thomas Jefferson’s writings, see Ritchie Robertson’s Epilogue, p. 235). However, as long as one assumed that all societies would eventually evolve along the same lines, such perceptions of non-synchronism did not fundamentally threaten the internal unity of any given stage, or “period”, of which stadial models were composed: even if a society reached the stage of “commerce” or “civilisation” or “monotheism” at a different point in history, one could still reasonably presume that, having reached this stage, the society in question would present the quintessential properties associated with it. Problems for the internal coherence of separate “stages” – and hence for the stadial variant of periodization – would only emerge later, with the growing realisation that upon achieving the same level of development in some areas societies did not, in fact, invariably assume the prototypical properties of a given stage in others.¹⁹ On the contrary, societies frequently retained prior differences and even continued to diverge in novel ways. If stages were to survive this

 Accounts of the “temporal turn” usually associate its beginnings with Fernand Braudel. For a summary of Braudel’s contribution, see J. R. Hall, “The Time of History and the History of Times”, History and Theory, 19/2 (1980), pp. 113 – 131; H. Jordheim, “Introduction: Multiple Temporalities and the Work of Synchronization”, History and Theory, 53/4 (2014), pp. 498 – 518.  Of course, stadialist models have also been attacked in much more comprehensive ways over the course of the 20th century, most famously by Franz Boas. In demolishing the very presumption of stages, however, such attacks also eliminated the peculiar problem that comes with wanting to reconcile stadialist models with societies’ failure to converge, namely, the problem that is of relevance to periodization. For this reason, these attacks will not be discussed.

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discovery as coherent units, they would clearly need to be adapted, loosened, even pluralised, to accommodate the permanence of disunity between societies. One solution was to incorporate inter-societal disunity into a given stage whilst stripping it of its nonsynchronous connotations. In this approach, intersocietal disunity would be reframed as the normal way in which another more essential feature of a particular period was expressed. Though they arose in different paradigms and address different questions, the “dependency theory” of the 1960s–1970s and the concept of “multiple modernities” both exemplify this solution well. In the case of the former, the allegedly premodern and hence “belated” nature of underdevelopment in global peripheries would be contested, by recasting underdevelopment as the product of an exploitative capitalist world-system: peripheries were, in effect, underdeveloped by their relations with metropoles and, thus, their underdevelopment was of a capitalist (i. e., synchronous) rather than feudal (i. e., nonsynchronous) nature.²⁰ Meanwhile, in order to make divergences within and between modern societies compatible with the formerly unilinear concept of modernity, the “multiple modernities” paradigm has reconceptualised modernity as “a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs” – in other words, in a manner that places plurality at modernity’s core.²¹ In both of these approaches, then, the non-synchronism of inter-societal disunity is denied, so that the deeper, temporal and systemic unity underpinning period concepts like “modernity” can be preserved. Another solution to the permanent disunity between and within societies was to accept that different stages might, in fact, overlap or even merge in various ways. This too could be imagined as the normal effect of how a single system or historical law operates, as in Leon Trotsky’s idea of “uneven and combined development”.²² At the same time, stadial overlap could also be recognised and analysed in particular instances without attempting to theorise its relationship to the dynamics of a wider system. This was the case for Ernst Bloch, the heterodox Marxist philosopher with whom the phrase “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous”, later picked up by Koselleck, is most associated. Bloch developed his idea of “non-synchronism” in 1930s Germany. His object was to explain the apparent paradox that at a time of “late capitalist” crisis

 E. g., A. Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York, 1967).  S.N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities”, Daedalus, 129/1 (2000), p. 2.  J.C. Allinson and A. Anievas, “The Uses and Misuses of Uneven and Combined Development: An Anatomy of a Concept”, Cambridge Review of International Studies, 22/1 (2009), pp. 47– 67; N. Davidson, “Uneven and Combined Development: Modernity, Modernism, Revolution”, https:// core.ac.uk/download/pdf/84340602.pdf (accessed 22 May 2020).

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many Germans turned not to the “synchronous” Marxist revolution but to the “anachronistic savagery” of Nazism, “a non-synchronism that verges on extraterritoriality – Negro drums rumble and central Africa rises up”.²³ The need to account for anachronistic politics pushed Bloch (and, indeed, many other observers of Nazism) to look for anachronistic causes: it was the endurance of precapitalist forms and subjectivities within German modernity, he argued, that had clouded the “synchronous contradiction” of modern capitalism and given responses to it a “nonsynchronous” complexion. Even before Bloch gave the idea a name, similar impressions of stadial hybridity were a common feature in Europe’s more peripheral regions.²⁴ Inevitably, the specific emphases of such ideas varied. Whilst Bloch had stressed the stadially compromised nature of German modernity, the reality of this modernity had never been in doubt. In early 20th-century East-Central Europe, meanwhile, it was the reality of East European modernity that many intellectuals questioned, its external forms interpreted as a mere veneer for an enduring and much more substantive pre-modernity. This, for instance, was the critique that the Hungarian radical (and husband of Anna Lesznai, the protagonist of Chapter 4) Oszkár Jászi directed at post-1867 Hungarian parliamentarism – a façade, in his view, for a persistent feudal regime.²⁵ As Lucian George’s chapter argues, a more intuitive folk variant of this idea also existed (albeit without any philosophy of history attached), evidenced in the persistent fears of re-feudalisation that lingered amongst Poland’s peasantry for decades after the abolition of serfdom. One of the achievements of the “temporal turn” in history has been to keep the manifestly productive idea of non-synchronism while stripping it of its earlier stadialist baggage. This has been possible principally because a new sensitivity

 E. Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics”, trans. M. Ritter, New German Critique, 11 (1977), pp. 32, 26.  Not that they are a monopoly of Europe’s peripheries; similar and highly influential arguments have been made about its centres as well. See, for instance, debates around the German Sonderweg (to which Ernst Bloch’s writings can be considered a contribution); the Nairn-Anderson thesis about the enduring anachronism of British political culture; and Arno Mayer’s thesis about the persistence of the old regime in the continent as a whole. For a selection of (by no means uncritical) introductions to these controversies, see J. Kocka, “Looking Back on the Sonderweg”, Central European History, 51 (2018), pp. 137– 142; E. Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London/New York, 1991), pp. 11– 17; A. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York, 1981) and Geoff Eley’s review of it in The Journal of Modern History, 54/1 (1982), pp. 95 – 99.  M. Janowski, “Drogi odrębne, drogi wspólne”, in M. Janowski (ed), Drogi odrębne, drogi wspólne: problem specyfiki rozwoju historycznego Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej w XIX-XX w. (Warsaw, 2014), p. 15.

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to the plurality of temporal processes, structures and layers in society has also made observers more open to the possibility of non-synchronism between them. From being limited to situations of epochal transition, therefore, non-synchronism has been transformed into an ordinary feature of all historical situations. Those “stadially salient” instances of non-synchronism that earlier observers like Ernst Bloch noticed and assumed to be signs of historical pathology (i. e., a failure to progress in a clear-cut stadial manner) no longer appear exceptional as a result.²⁶ This normalisation and universalisation of non-synchronism is most explicit in Koselleck’s effort to provide a theoretical basis for conceptual history, with its extensive discussion of the “nonsynchronicities between concepts and events, between different concepts, and between different elements in the same concepts”.²⁷ As Koselleck was aware, the same temporal tensions can be observed within and between all other structures of social life. Even without referring to the concept of non-synchronism, the work of anthropologist Maurice Bloch (no relation of Ernst) has been particularly useful in making visible and theorising this aspect of social reality – or, as he once called it, “the past and the present in the present”.²⁸ Throughout his career, Bloch has sought to elaborate an originally Durkheimian argument positing the existence of two different levels of social cognition. The first of these levels, manifesting itself in the realm of practical activities and shared by humans with their closest primate relatives, is characterised by Maurice Bloch as empirical, adaptable and transactional – or, in Ernst Bloch’s language, “synchronous”. The second, which provides the basis for essentialized social roles and group identities, social structures and associated belief systems, is, by contrast, in significant ways non-empirical, detached from processes of change and the roughand-tumble of everyday life – in other words, “nonsynchronous”. It is the coexistence of these two levels that, by way of example, allows many societies to pay deference to elders in their symbolic (i. e., nonsynchronous) capacity as leaders,

 Admittedly, something along the lines of non-synchronism had already been normalised in Trotsky’s idea of “uneven and combined development”. Crucially, however, Trotsky’s interest in non-synchronism only went as far as this related to the mixing of elements drawn from different modes of production, that is, different stages of development (Allinson and Anievas, “Uses and Misuses”, p. 52). From the perspective of the “temporal turn”, therefore, this would remain a relatively narrow understanding of the concept of non-synchronism.  Jordheim, “Introduction”, p. 504. For a more elaborate exposition of Koselleck’s take on the “simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous”, see H. Jordheim, “Does Conceptual History Really Need a Theory of Historical Times?”, Contributions to the History of Concepts, 6/2 (2011), pp. 21– 41.  M. Bloch, “The Past and the Present in the Present”, Man, 12/2 (1977), pp. 278 – 292.

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even whilst marginalising them in everyday activities and power-politics – a separation of power and status, of the “transactional social” and the “transcendental social”, which would not, for instance, be possible amongst chimpanzees.²⁹ In this reading, non-synchronism is built into an important chunk of human sociality and is itself a central part of what makes humans unique. Expanded to the point of omnipresence, non-synchronism does not cease to be a problem for periodization; instead, it only serves to expose the extent of periodization’s inevitable distortions. This eye-opening effect can be shown by considering the following, seemingly banal observation: even as they experience and partake in historical events that are singular, transformative, even epochmaking (such as 1917 and 1945), historical actors retain memories of past experiences, as well as identities, roles, behaviours, networks and dispositions grounded in these memories; moreover, these facets of historical actors do not evolve at the same speed, or even at all, in response to the historical events in question. Once it has been apprehended through the lens of non-synchronism, this utterly obvious fact suddenly transforms into a source of intellectual insight – and a headache for the periodizer. Aleksei Lokhmatov’s chapter provides a brilliant case in point, using the example of three different political-intellectual groups in post-1945 Poland to illustrate the impossibility of periodizing the history of political thought on the basis of thinkers’ shared chronology. So different was the weight played by each group’s intellectual past in its post-1945 development, and so different the extent to which each adapted its ideas (or developed new ones in response) to the post-1945 political context, that a satisfactory periodization encompassing the intellectual history of all three proves impossible: for only two of the groups would 1945 constitute an important moment in their intellectual history, and for only one a real caesura.

III The limits of (synchronic) context Besides exposing the limits of periodization, the universality of non-synchronism can also serve to problematise another of the historian’s most trusty tools, that is, the contextualist approach. Unlike periodization, however, for which – as we have seen – historians do not reserve much reverence, the explanatory primacy of context is at times represented as a central tenet of historical disciplines.

 M. Bloch, “Why religion is nothing special but is central”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 363 (2008), p. 2056. See also M. Bloch, Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 112– 113.

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Historians as different (and illustrious) as Quentin Skinner and E.P. Thompson have placed it at the centre of what history is and how it should be done.³⁰ As Peter Burke has shown in a wide-ranging survey of the concept’s fortunes across time and academic paradigms, the term context has also enjoyed a similar popularity in many other disciplines over the last half-century.³¹ It bears mentioning then – in light of the divergent treatment they receive – that the contextualist approach and periodization are, in certain key respects, practices cut from a similar cloth. Both have a particularist orientation, underscoring differences within the past rather than similarities or recurrences across it. Both also assume that historical phenomena within the temporal units they generate (be they periods or contexts) will tend towards interconnection and will, for the same reason, be better understood in relation to one another. Given such affinities, it is unsurprising that they should share some of the same weaknesses as well. With such a stellar career behind it, the contextual “method” has, predictably enough, also invited its share of criticism. Critics have especially focused on the logical impossibility of knowing what the right context for understanding a phenomenon should be, particularly on the impossibility of determining its scale.³² As intellectual historian Martin Jay asked: “ […] is the most potent context something as global as an historical epoch or chronotope? […] Or do we have to look at more proximate contexts, say the precise social, political, or educational institutions in which the historical actor was embedded, the generation to which he or she belonged, or the family out of which he or she emerged?”³³ Implied in Jay’s formulation is the notion that these ambiguities of scale are best understood in terms of a spatial metaphor (i. e., where is the right context?). What such a metaphor occludes is that the same ambiguities are also – in a much more literal sense – temporal: the trouble is not just knowing where a context should be looked for but also when. There is, of course, a reason why Jay and

 J. Tully (ed), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton, 1988); C. Calhoun, “E. P. Thompson and the Discipline of Historical Context”, Social Research, 61/2 (1994), pp. 223 – 243.  P. Burke, “Context in Context”, Common Knowledge, 8/1 (2002), p. 152.  E. g., T. Shogimen, “On the Elusiveness of Context”, History and Theory, 55/2 (2016), pp. 233 – 252; Burke, “Context in Context”, p. 172. The ambiguity mentioned here has also allowed context to be defined in different ways by different approaches – indeed, it is somewhat ironic that the foundational text of what has come to be known as Quentin Skinner’s brand of contextualism contained an attack on “the contextual methodology” (Q. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”, History and Theory, 8/1 (1969), p. 43).  M. Jay, “Historical Explanation and the Event: Reflections on the Limits of Contextualisation”, New Literary History, 42 (2011), p. 560.

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other critics do not pose the question in these terms: the assumption that explanatory contexts ought to be contemporary to their explananda is so hardwired as to go unstated in defences and critiques of contextualism alike. In light of what we know about non-synchronism, however, any such assumption is necessarily misguided. As will be illustrated in this section, this is all the more so given that significant realms of human activity and thought are constructed – with varying degrees of intentionality – such as to deny synchronic environments primacy in determining the form that human behaviours take.³⁴ In such cases, non-synchronism is not so much an accident as an inbuilt, structural effect – and, hence, a relatively predictable limit to the explanatory power of (synchronic) contexts and to the reach of periodization. One place where we have already seen such structural non-synchronism is the “transcendental” cognition and sociality discussed by Maurice Bloch. Indeed, it is in the practices most associated with what Bloch calls the “transcendental social” that behavioural invariance and autonomy from wider synchronic contexts are usually most striking. An extreme example of this is offered by religious ritual, a type of activity for which formal continuity across time and the aura of atemporality derived from this are often explicit and, indeed, celebrated ends. To safeguard such ends, expressive creativity in ritual is often limited and ritual communication formalised. This, in turn, isolates ritual’s inner machinery from wider social processes, that is, from all contexts other than the essentially diachronic context of the ritual’s own history – an isolation that is visible in the archaism of ritual language and the frequent impossibility of making its meanings intelligible outside the ritual situation.³⁵ Thus, the desire for atemporality, which – logically speaking – must be prior to and hence external to ritual, becomes imprinted in ritual’s internal dynamics, ensuring that, as long as people are willing to perform ritual (and the reasons may change and vary), its forms are likely to remain nonsynchronously constant. This inner constancy, in turn, is part of what enables ritual to reproduce the stable and, hence, also nonsynchronous identity structures that ensure the continual pressure to have ritual performed, regardless of wider synchronic contexts.³⁶

 Similarly, Peter Burke has drawn attention to the possible tensions between situation-oriented and tradition-oriented approaches. Burke, “Context in Context”, p. 174.  M. Bloch, “Symbols, song, dance and features of articulation: is religion an extreme form of traditional authority?”, in M. Bloch, Ritual, history and power (London, 1989), pp. 27, 39 – 40.  The perspective on ritual presented here – almost entirely derived from Maurice Bloch – is, of course, far from being uncontested or exhaustive. Because of its focus on issues of continuity and atemporality, however, Bloch’s work is uniquely well-placed to help in the present task of problematising the contextualist approach; and it is this, rather than an unwillingness to con-

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A modern, secular example of how ritualised expressions of the “transcendental social” defy historical change is presented in Andrea Talabér’s chapter, a discussion of continuities in national day celebrations in East-Central Europe over the course of an otherwise tumultuous 20th century. To explain the endurance of a tradition like St Stephen’s Day, a celebration of Hungarian statehood that was preserved in some form by every 20th-century Hungarian regime (notwithstanding its questionable compatibility with some of their other ideological imperatives), Talabér does not, however, focus exclusively on the tradition’s lasting emotional power or, even less, on its inner ritual machinery. Instead, considerable attention is devoted to the successive political contexts in which this endurance occurred, that is, the changing political projects and self-legitimisation strategies of different political actors involved in keeping the tradition alive. In part, this decision to recount continuity through a focus on what changed around it is an inevitable consequence of the narrative form.³⁷ Recognising political actors’ efforts to manipulate and reengineer the St Stephen’s tradition also allows Talabér to avoid an excessively deterministic reading of its reproduction which, in the final analysis, always depended on the contextually situated agency of political actors. Crucially, however, a focus on political contexts also helps us see how these contexts did not matter. It is clear, for instance, that political actors’ freedom not to reproduce the St Stephen’s tradition was always severely constrained – by their own need for legitimacy, on the one hand, and the delegitimising effect of not reproducing it, on the other. In short, whilst political actors sought to reshape the tradition and were frequently successful in their efforts, the constancy of their desire to engage with it was, in large part, an adjustment to the tradition’s self-imposition on the reality they were trying to control – a self-imposition that rode roughshod over repeated changes in political context (not to mention the associated period boundaries). Whilst examples like this present particularly stubborn forms of non-synchronism, it is not just in those social practices which make repetition a hallowed virtue that we can expect the primacy of synchronic contexts to be systematically constrained. Similarly frequent, if much less comprehensive, constraints can be observed in all traditions, including those – like many of the arts – which

sider other perspectives, which explains my own one-sided presentation of the subject. For more positive readings of ritual that show greater appreciation for its creative possibilities see F. Cannell, “How Does Ritual Matter?”, in R. Astuti, J. Parry and C. Stafford (eds), Questions of Anthropology (Oxford, 2007), pp. 105 – 136; A. B. Seligman, R. P. Weller, M. J. Puett and B. Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford and New York, 2008).  Bennett, “Confronting Continuity”, pp. 78 – 9.

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put as much (or even more of) a premium on individual creativity as on conformity with precedents.³⁸ It is in artistic traditions, moreover, that non-synchronism can often take the most systematically idiosyncratic forms. This is a function of how such traditions are transmitted: rather than being shared by primarily social means, cultural “information” in the arts is often communicated, in large part, through material media of an enduring (e. g., buildings) or reproducible (e. g., books) nature.³⁹ This enables the two moments of which cultural transmission is composed (the act of “teaching” and the act of “learning”) to be separated and the temporal distance between transmitter and receiver vastly to expand. However, such media of transmission do not just increase the temporal scale of non-synchronism. Rather, they also generate a non-synchronism that is qualitatively different, giving actors in the present a degree of exposure to the more distant past that is – relative to other traditions – unique in its lack of mediation by the more recent past and by the present, in other words a type of exposure that is uniquely independent of contextual factors. This uniqueness can be illustrated in a number of ways. First of all, when material media of transmission prevail over social ones, any given instance of cultural transmission ceases to be absolutely dependent on all previous instances: unlike in social forms of cultural learning, where acquisition of information hinges on contact with another individual(s) located within the transmission chain, here the crucial (though, of course, rarely exclusive) factor becomes access to the relevant material medium, whose continued existence and hence accessibility is much less conditional upon the active consent of successive generations (hence, why past artists can be “rediscovered” after being forgotten). Equally, because the ideal endpoint of transmission in the arts is a new act of material production that is separate from its model, the process of transmission is a uniquely cumulative one: texts, for instance, are “added” to the canon rather than overwriting old ones. This also means that any “mutations” which cultural “information” undergoes during transmission (and of course, in art which aims

 For a less sociological and more psychoanalytical analysis of the tension between precedent and innovation in literature see H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford, 1975).  I am here using the term “cultural information” in a much more inclusive sense than is typical of everyday usages, as a generic description for all kinds of cultural representations, models, understandings etc. without any implication of facticity. In this, I am following the usage of the term that is prevalent in more evolutionary and cognitive approaches to the study of culture. For more see D. Sperber and N. Claidière, “Defining and explaining culture (comments on Richerson and Boyd, Not by genes alone)”, Biology and Philosophy, 23/2 (2008), pp. 283 – 292.

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to be innovative such mutations are wholly intentional) are less likely than in exclusively social forms of cultural learning to bear a decisive impact on all subsequent iterations of this information’s transmission: after all, new “learners” are able to return to the original cultural model (say, by reading Homer’s Odyssey) and, thereby, to bypass the mutation (say, by ignoring or remaining ignorant of Joyce’s Ulysses). This exploration of artistic non-synchronism is not meant to deny the significance of contextual and intertextual factors in determining how artistic products are received and produced. Cultural transmission in the arts can never be completely independent of synchronic contexts (e. g., the social dynamics of the art world⁴⁰ or historically situated modes of reception⁴¹) or, indeed, of the diachronic context of the artistic tradition itself, which causes past texts to be read through the lens of other texts (produced at different points in the past) and the codes, conventions etc. they collectively generate.⁴² These points, however, are in my view better seen as qualifications, rather than negations, of the peculiar form of non-synchronism that separates many arts from traditions which rely primarily or exclusively on social means of learning.⁴³ It is perhaps only because the arts are infrequently viewed alongside these other traditions and treated as variations of the same thing (cultural learning) that the peculiarity of this non-synchronism does not draw more attention. Adopting this kind of comparative perspective, however, allows us to rediscover the value in the now thoroughly unfashionable belief according to which “the ‘timeless present’ […] is an essential characteristic of literature [which] means that the literature of the past can always be active in that of the present. So Homer in Virgil, Virgil in Dante […] Or in our day: The Thousand and One Nights and Calderón in Hofmannsthal; the Odyssey in Joyce; Aeschylus, Petronius, Dante, Tristan Corbière,

 E. g., P. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, 1996).  For more on the theory of literary reception as developed in the largely untranslated work of literary scholar Hans Robert Jauss, see O. Rush, The Reception of Doctrine: An Appropriation of Hans Robert Jauss’ Reception Aesthetics and Literary Hermeneutics (Rome, 1997).  G. Allen, Intertextuality (London, 2000).  Of course, the “social” traditions with which some of the arts are being contrasted here also frequently mix social and material media of transmission and possess other “mechanisms” to reduce the impact of individual mutations on the overall stability of cultural forms. The picture presented here is very much that of a simplified ideal type. For a more nuanced discussion of cultural transmission which considers these points at greater length, see Sperber and Claidière, “Defining and explaining culture”.

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Spanish mysticism in T. S. Eliot.”⁴⁴ Notably for current purposes, it was precisely this sensitivity to the structural atemporality of literature that led the author of these words, the literary scholar Ernst Robert Curtius, to reject periodization in his own magnum opus in favour of the full sweep of literary tradition: for “to see European literature as a whole is possible only after one has acquired citizenship in every period from Homer to Goethe.”⁴⁵ Indeed, whilst so strong an emphasis on “timelessness” may now seem eccentric, similar frustrations continue to lead literary scholars to grope for more diachronic perspectives and categories of analysis in lieu of periodization.⁴⁶ It would appear, then, that non-synchronism is a feature more concentrated in some areas of human culture than others. At the same time, some degree of non-synchronism is also a structural characteristic of all culture.⁴⁷ This becomes especially apparent whenever cultural representations affect the way new situations and events are processed and defined. Cultural representations are, of course, capable of adapting to novelty, but some of the schemata and stereotypes that cultures generate can also display remarkably low mutability in the face of changing contexts. An extreme version of this is found in what Claude LéviStrauss described as “cold societies”, in which historical change is negated, even resented, and new events inserted into culturally encoded storylines, thereby denying them their singularity.⁴⁸ Lucian George’s chapter on the rumours of

 E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, 2013 [1953]), p. 15. In making this observation, Curtius too was writing with a comparative purpose, namely to contrast literature with the visual arts, whose media did not allow for the same “ontological” relationship with the past “simply because, all else aside literature is the medium of ideas, art not” (p. 14). Regardless of whether one agrees with Curtius’ distinction, I think that a much starker and less contestable divide is that which has been sketched out here between material and social means of transmission.  Idem, p. 12. For the more contextual reasons which prompted Curtius to adopt this kind of perspective see C S. Jaeger, “Ernst Robert Curtius: A Medievalist’s Contempt for the Middle Ages”, Viator, 47/2 (2016), pp. 367– 379.  E. g., Mattix, “Periodization and Difference”, pp. 394– 5.  This is implicit, for example, in the distinction that Dan Sperber draws between the social and the cultural: “Something is social to the extent that it involves some cognitively mediated co-ordination among individuals. Something is cultural to the extent that it involves the stabilisation of representations or productions by means of cognitively mediated coordination among individuals.” D. Sperber, “Conceptual Tools for a Natural Science of Society and Culture (Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthopology 1999)” http://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/up loads/2001_conceptual-tools-for-a-natural-science-of-society-and-culture.pdf (accessed 22 May 2020), p. 12.  For a classic, if contested, example see M. Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago/London, 1985).

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re-enserfment that circulated amongst Polish peasants after their emancipation presents a comparable European example of this orientation to the past and future: here, too, unfamiliar and frightening occurrences were repeatedly understood through the lens of a familiar storyline, though in this particular instance familiarity did not offer reassurance and there was no cultural pressure to deny historical change. Whilst George tries to show how economic and discursive factors – in other words, synchronic contexts – helped perpetuate the recurrent rumour structure, ultimately these contexts can never provide a complete explanation, precisely because the rumours were schematic in nature and, hence, at least partially context-independent. As these various examples of non-synchronism have hopefully shown, a significant chunk of historians’ subject matter is made up of structures of varying durations, which are to a large extent self-perpetuating, and autonomous in their internal dynamics, and whose specific configuration at any point in time can only very partially be understood in terms of their relationship to other synchronic phenomena.⁴⁹ Intuitively, this is something that historians already know. My purpose, however, has been to expose the incongruity between this facet of historical reality and a contextual approach that is at times assumed to hold the sole key to historical understanding.

IV Periodization and historical change Whilst the preceding sections of this introduction were mainly about continuities, this final section will focus on how periodization relates to change. Specifically, I aim to show how all acts of periodization are premised on theories of historical change – theories that, whilst usually unstated, are crucial in determining how periodization is done. Such theories are inevitably contestable; and, as this section will also show, their contestation readily overlaps with the revision of periodization. The claim that periodization relies on theories of historical change can be broken into two parts, each of which will be dealt with separately in this section. First, I will argue that periodization is necessarily premised on the capacity to distinguish between those phenomena (or aspects thereof) that are subject to historical change and those that are not. Second, I will try to show how period-

 For a more elaborate discussion of self-perpetuating structures, see O. Patterson, “Culture and continuity: causal structures in socio-cultural persistence”, in R. Friedland and J. Mohr (eds), Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 79 – 82.

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ization is also premised on the capacity to make conceptual distinctions between different kinds of historical change. The first of these arguments follows from periodization’s status as a historicist practice, that is, a practice based on the assumption that the past is different, that there are differences within the past and ipso facto that these differences emerge as a result of historical change.⁵⁰ An implication of this is that the differentiae specificae by which periods are defined must also be properties that can be historicised: in other words, properties that are contingent and subject to change. At the same time, for there to be a periodization of something, there must also be an element of fixity to that something. Indeed, not even the most relativist of historians would consider the past’s differentness to be total; for humans to constitute a transhistorical unit of analysis, after all, some aspects of the “human condition” must be thought to transcend history. By implication, without some commonality across periods, periodization of human history would not make much sense as a practice. It follows that an ability to recognise the existence of both the historically mutable and the historically immutable and to distinguish between them is an integral, if mostly unspoken and semi-conscious, premise of any periodization. Determining what is and is not historically mutable is no easy or consensual matter. It demands an ability to draw lines between historical universals and historical particulars – lines that have been conceived differently at different times, in different societies, by different schools of thought.⁵¹ Even when the line itself is consensual, the reasons why a certain phenomenon is classed as particular/ universal may vary. Matters are further complicated by the existence, alongside transhistorical or “absolute” universals, of what we might call “relative” universals: aspects of human history which – whilst not widely thought to be predetermined by human nature, as in the case of “absolute” universals – are nevertheless sufficiently widespread in time and space (e. g., the existence of the state) as to become de facto universals for many of the societies that historians study. A  This point is further developed in Ritchie Robertson’s chapter. My remarks here deliberately exclude those forms of periodization, which divide time in a non-interpretive manner, e. g., on the basis of a relatively arbitrary unit like dynastic rules or a totally arbitrary one like centuries.  It does not follow from this distinction that universals cannot be studied historically. As Patrick Colm Hogan put it in a classic essay advocating the study of literary universals: “[the] study of universals and the study of cultural and historical particularity are mutually necessary. Like laws of nature, cultural universals are instantiated variously, particularized in specific circumstances” (P. C. Hogan, “Literary Universals”, in L. Zunshine (ed), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore, 2010), p. 40). In this volume we might, for instance, consider Aaron Clift’s chapter on French discourses of anticommunism as being about a historically particular instantiation of the universal category of the “moral panic”.

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“relative universal” can, however, revert to the role of a particular if the historical gaze is widened enough (e. g., if state societies are viewed alongside pre-state ones): hence, the universal which – at one level – is the fixed object of periodization at another can itself become a period’s particular hallmark. This additional layer of fluidity further amplifies the potential for disagreement over where change is considered possible or likely to occur. As assumptions about what is universal/particular vary, so do the periodization schemes that are shaped by them. By the same measure, when these assumptions are challenged, the chronology and substantive features of the relevant periodizations also become subject to contestation. Broadly speaking, this contestation can take two forms. In the first variant, it can be argued that the importance or particularity of certain particulars has been overemphasised, with the result that universals have been overlooked or themselves miscategorised as particulars. Typically, this also implies that the strength and number of period boundaries has been exaggerated. A case in point is offered by the critique that Judith Bennett directed at some of the dominant norms in women’s history, specifically at how changes in women’s historical experiences, especially those associated with major historical shifts (e. g., the Industrial Revolution), are usually assumed to signal transformations in their socioeconomic status. By overwhelmingly focusing on historical changes – in short, by overemphasising the particular – such histories failed to notice the more important story, which was the enduring, structural entrenchment of patriarchal systems: indeed, many of the changes these histories foregrounded would actually be better understood not as transformations but as different instantiations of this “relative” universal. The same bias would also cause many such accounts to misread what was really a historically stable, structural effect of patriarchy – namely the economic subordination of women – as being particular or at least more particular to some short periods rather than others.⁵² A similar objection to excessive “particularisation” occurs in many of the criticisms levelled at the secularisation thesis in the social sciences (that is, the thesis equating modernisation with secularisation and, thus, by implication, religion – especially its public presence – with the premodern).⁵³ To contest its core assumptions about what is universal/particular and the periodization built on them, critics have (i) pointed to evidence of religion’s resilience/resurgence in modern societies (thereby questioning religion’s particular association with pre-

 Bennett, “Confronting Continuity”.  F. Cannell, “The Anthropology of Secularism”, Annual Review of Anthropology, 39 (2010), pp. 85 – 100.

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modern periods);⁵⁴ (ii) portrayed religious yearning/experience as a human universal that manifests itself even when cultural conditions for its expression are lacking;⁵⁵ and (iii) embarked on a counteroffensive, by historicising, in other words particularising, the secular – a category that proponents of the secularisation thesis usually take for granted as humans’ somehow natural post-religious state.⁵⁶ The third of these challenges to the secularisation thesis exemplifies the second strategy whereby a shift in the boundary between the particular and the universal can be used to contest a particular periodization. Predictably enough, this strategy simply does the opposite of the first. This time, it is argued that a particular has been dissolved into (or miscategorised as) a universal and, consequently, has not been historicised – and, in some cases, periodized – enough. A textbook example of this approach can be found in the work of Marxist thinker Ellen Meiksins Wood. Wood developed an extensive critique of mainstream historical accounts of capitalism, including ones by leading Marxist historians, for their failure to analyse capitalism as a “specific social form, the product of a dramatic historical rupture”, with its own particular laws of motion and historical point of origin (which, in Wood’s account, was the countryside of 16th- and 17th-century England). This insufficient understanding for the true historical particularity of capitalism was reflected in the under-periodization of capitalism’s emergence: in most accounts, “capitalism seems always to be there, somewhere; and it only needs to be released from its chains – for instance, from the fetters of feudalism – to be allowed to grow and mature.” Because most historians did not fundamentally distinguish between the capitalist market, with its historically particular laws of motion, and exchange more generally, which “has existed since time immemorial”, many of them ended up conflating the two. Thus, a historically specific system was merged with a universal and anachronistically projected onto earlier periods in the process.⁵⁷

 E. g., J. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994).  E. g., F. Cannell, “English ancestors: the moral possibilities of popular genealogy”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17/3 (2011), pp. 462– 480.  E. g., T. Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2004).  E. Meiksins Wood, “Modernity, postmodernity or capitalism?”, Review of International Political Economy, 4/3 (1997), p. 542– 3; for a fuller account see E. Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London, 2002). Besides leading her to advocate a more historicist (hence periodized) approach to the origins of capitalism, Wood’s insistence on capitalism’s systemic particularity also led her to take a sceptical view of “hard” attempts to periodize within it: “Of course it is important to analyse the never-ending changes in capitalism. But periodisation involves more than just tracking the process of change. To propose a periodisation of epochal shifts is to say something about what is essential in defining a social form like capitalism”

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Though the two approaches delineated here are, at one level, oriented towards opposing ends – one seeking to erase or at least weaken period boundaries where the other seeks to entrench and deepen them – underpinning both is the same concern to remould assumptions about what historians can expect to be mutable, and hence period-specific in the past, and what they can reasonably expect to stay the same or to recur – even if with varying intensities or in different configurations – across different periods. Put differently, both are involved in the creation of workable theories about historical change (and, hence, about continuity), upon which periodization can be based. Periodization, however, cannot limit itself to differentiating between the changing and the constant: it also needs to make distinctions between different kinds and intensities of change. Failing this, the historian will be forced to embrace a debilitating Heracliteanism, in which “everything flows” and structural classification of reality ceases to be possible. As a practice that combines recognition of change with a structural classification of the past, periodization is, for this reason, necessarily premised on a capacity to distinguish between different kinds of change. (Here we come to the second of this section’s arguments for why theories of historical change are a necessary foundation for periodization). Besides making such distinctions, periodization also needs to determine which kinds of change are more significant. Only this way does it become possible to treat some chunks of time as sufficiently unified within themselves – notwithstanding the changes they encompass – but sufficiently different from others – because of the changes between them – as to be worth separating as periods. Various attempts have been made to theorise these “hierarchies” of change and thereby to generate transferable analytical models.⁵⁸ For the most part, however, it is in a much more implicit and unsystematic manner that historians go about creating such hierarchies. Generalisation about how they do so nevertheless remains possible. Whether implicit or explicit, the fundamental principles underlying hierarchies of change are, in fact, both limited in number and universal. For this reason, it is the same handful of principles that we observe at work

(Wood, “Modernity, postmodernity”, p. 540). In other words, at the level of analysis where capitalism could assume the role of a “relative” universal, Wood’s instinct to resist over-periodization and to privilege the systemic over the particular would closely resemble that shown by Judith Bennett with regards to patriarchy.  E. g., F. Braudel, “Histoire et Sciences sociales : La longue durée”, Annales, 13/4 (1958), pp. 7– 37; M. Gluckman, “The Utility of the Equilibrium Model in the Study of Social Change”, American Anthropologist, 70/2 (1968), pp. 219 – 237. For a summary of Koselleck’s contribution in this area, see N. Olsen, History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (New York/Oxford, 2012), p. 272.

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whenever periodization schemes are attacked for not hierarchising change correctly. Two of these will now briefly be discussed. The first approach to hierarchising change distinguishes between less important “surface”-level and more important “base”-level changes to a structure or system. Applied critically, it can be used to attack a periodization scheme for privileging changes at the surface level over typically slower changes at the base level, or for ignoring the latter entirely. Bennett’s critique of women’s history for overemphasizing surface-level experiential changes exemplifies this well. The same “surface” versus “base” distinction also allows for the same line of attack in reverse, i. e., one that criticises periodization schemes that accept a surface-level continuity at face value without noticing the transformation of the underlying causal structure. By way of example, the Marxist scholar Tom Brass has rejected attempts to interpret unfree labour relations in the contemporary world through the lens of “semi-feudalism” on the grounds that behind such feudal appearances the dynamics upholding these relations are, in fact, thoroughly capitalistic.⁵⁹ Meanwhile, another approach ranks changes not according to their depth but on the basis of their linearity/cyclicality. In this perspective, changes shown to contain a cyclical element are partially or completely discredited as a basis upon which to separate periods. Underlying this is a historicist expectation that periods, like history in general, can only be singular and unrepeatable. Consequently, periods must also be the result of changes that are singular and unrepeatable. Cyclicality, by contrast, renders changes predictable, recursive, in other words better-suited to structuralist forms of analysis – typically within the confines of a period – than to the diachronic, narrative-based approach which befits epoch-making changes. That some changes are of a cyclical nature – be it the change of the seasons or the routine delivery of mail – is hardly a matter of dispute (so much so that few would consider the delivery of mail a form of change). The status of other changes, however, is rather more contentious; it is here that arguments over periodization – or indeed, the very possibility of periodizing a phenomenon – emerge. In the history of art periodization-based approaches which conceive of periods as a sequence of unrepeatable lifecycles (periods are born, rise and die) have, in the past, competed with an “alternative method, descended from the aesthetics of Burke and Schiller, which regards the history of art as a series of pendulum swings between polar opposites such as Optic and Haptic, Additive

 T. Brass, “Rural Labour in Agrarian Transitions: The Semi-Feudal Thesis Revisited”, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 32/4 (2002), pp. 456 – 473.

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and Divisive”.⁶⁰ Meanwhile, one of the oldest and best-known controversies in peasant studies, commonly known as the “Lenin-Chayanov debate”, also centres on whether changes in the size of peasant smallholdings should be understood in linear or cyclical terms. According to Lenin, inequalities in the size of peasant farms in turn-of-the-century Russia presented a clear sign of peasant agriculture’s linear transition from feudalism to capitalism. In Chayanov’s view, by contrast, these inequalities offered no more than a momentary snapshot of a recurrent cycle of household expansion and contraction that was typical of a stable peasant economy.⁶¹ Thus, where Lenin saw epoch-making change, Chayanov saw only the cyclical variety. Finally, it is worth noticing how imputations of circularity are also made in a more casual manner in historical arguments, as a standard way of diminishing the historical significance and, hence, epoch-making character of various events and processes. By way of example, to counter the view according to which mounting national conflict doomed the pre-1914 Austrian state to collapse, Pieter Judson has argued that “[…] historians who study Austrian domestic politics interpret many of the most egregious examples of national conflict in terms of political ritual with its own predictable [emphases mine] dynamics and limits, rather than as an uncontrollable force that eventually destroyed the monarchy.”⁶² In the present collection, an “emic” variation of this style of argument can be found in Jan Burek’s chapter. As part of his effort to relativise the pre-eminence of the Second World War as an impermeable period boundary in Polish social history, Burek explores alternative ways in which the war was perceived by the people who lived through it. Assuming this “emic” perspective allows Burek to show how a variety of actors did not experience the war as an exclusively singular event and how some of them even understood it as part of a larger historical cycle in which “germans (sic) come, germans go […]” (p. 44). This, in turn, helps soften the ground for Burek’s broader consideration of transwar patterns and continuities. To sum up, this section has sought to show how deeply periodization is entangled with the theories of change – be they explicit or implicit – with which historians operate. The content and boundaries of any given periodization will always depend on how historians draw distinctions between the mutable and immutable and how they rank different kinds of change. Whilst these distinc Schapiro et al., “Criteria of Periodization”, p. 117.  For a good summary see H. Bernstein, “V.I. Lenin and A.V. Chayanov: looking back, looking forward”, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36/1 (2009), pp. 55 – 81.  P. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (London/Cambridge MA, 2006), p. 8.

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tions and rankings will forever be contested, the underlying principles of their contestation (e. g., disputing the particularity/universality of specific phenomena or questioning the profundity and linearity of specific types of change) are likely to remain constant – and thus a crucial element in debates over periodization.

V Chapter Overview Having explored some of the broader theoretical and methodological issues raised by the rethinking of periodization and how individual case studies connect to them, it is now time to provide a more detailed overview of each chapter’s arguments. The first three chapters destabilise periodization by looking at history “from below”. In the first chapter, this vantage point is combined with a theoretically informed micro-historical perspective. Concentrating his gaze on shop floor-level processes and perceptions of change/continuity in the declining Polish mill town of Żyrardów during the first half of the 20th century, Jan Burek challenges the accepted practice of treating the Second World War and subsequent communist takeover as moments of absolute rupture in Polish socio-political history. Burek’s choice of target is bold: successive historiographies – both communist and postcommunist – have had and continue to have considerable political stakes invested in the maintenance of this axiomatic boundary. Burek, however, resists such presuppositions. His focus on local perspectives and evidence leads him to observe substantial personal, institutional and ideological continuities, within the Żyrardów labour movement and factory life more broadly, between the interwar and immediate post-war years – continuities that would only be snuffed out after 1948, with generational change and Stalinization. Though the chronological shift in Burek’s periodization may appear trivially small, the historiographical implications are not. Burek’s analysis (i) challenges the notion that communism did not have robust indigenous roots in the pre-war Żyrardów labour movement; and (ii) demonstrates that much of the conflict between workers and factory management after 1945 was configured not as a struggle against a novel and alien system but as resistance – often expressed in terms compatible with pre-war communist ideology – to the re-imposition of various aspects of the pre-war factory regime. Though Burek recognises that Żyrardów cannot be considered a typical Polish town, this is turned into a micro-historical strength. Żyrardów’s unrepresentativeness, its “exceptional typical” status to use Edoardo Grendi’s phrase, actually makes it easier to discern here than elsewhere continuities that may also have occurred on a larger scale but in blunted form:

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thus, a micro-level challenge to periodization has the potential to acquire macrolevel significance. Though Burek is the only author to make explicit use of micro-historical theory, other chapters also rely on strategies akin to what Carlo Ginzburg has characterised as the method of “clues” – an epistemological approach that takes apparently trivial, formerly neglected details which do not quite fit the dominant historiographical picture and uses them to reconstruct larger, hitherto unnoticed structures.⁶³ This is the case in Lucian George’s chapter, which – like Burek’s – combines a clue-based approach with “history from below”. The incongruous detail which provides the entry point of George’s analysis is the series of panics that periodically shook the late 19th- and early 20th-century countryside of Austrian and later Polish Galicia, in response to rumours of re-enserfment. These re-enserfment panics have never attracted the sustained attention of historians, in part because of their awkwardness as a historical datum: their very occurrence jars with the dominant emphasis – both within historiography and amongst social elites at the time – on various processes of modernisation and nation-building. Considering the panics in the context of broader rural experiences and discourses, George argues that, for over half a century after the abolition of forced labour in 1848, the gulf between the feudal past and a modern present would seem far from absolute to many Galician peasants. In part, this was due to continuities in peasant experiences between the pre- and post-1848 periods – continuities rooted in the partial preservation of feudal hierarchies, conflicts and property relations after the abolition of serfdom. George illustrates how these experiential continuities lent credibility to re-enserfment rumours, by offering an account of the last great re-enserfment panic of 1932 and viewing it in a broader socioeconomic context. After considering how peasants’ experiences informed their historical temporality, George turns his attention to how peasant temporalities were also shaped, at the cultural and discursive level, by commemorative traditions and political discourses. First, he presents the cultural mechanisms through which the memory of serfdom was transmitted and integrated into rural identities, priming peasants who had no personal experience of serfdom to discern the legacies of the past in the present. Next, he considers the relationship between the memory of serfdom and the emergence of mass politics. Whilst acknowledging that peasants’ integration into the political nation generally defused the most visceral fears of re-enserfment, George also argues that, in key

 C. Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method”, History Workshop Journal, 9/1 (1980), pp. 5 – 36; M. Peltonen, “Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro–Macro Link in Historical Research”, History and Theory, 40/3 (2001), pp. 347– 359.

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respects, this process entrenched the social salience of the memory of serfdom and, with it, the gulf between how different social groups perceived and experienced the present in its relation to the past. In the interwar period – the focus of George’s chapter – the memory and language of serfdom came to be treated by political entrepreneurs as a potent discursive resource: by drawing parallels between aspects of the present and the feudal past, opponents could be discredited, political claims reinforced and contemporary antagonisms intensified. At the same time, the spread of the peasant political movement deepened many politically conscious peasants’ interest in and identification with the memory of serfdom. Thus, “far from withering, [feudal memory traditions] became the basis for modern political identities, claims and antagonisms” (p. 60). Like the preceding two chapters, Aaron Clift’s study of anticommunist discourse in late 1940s France also employs a strategic change of social vantage point in order to achieve a different perspective on the period under study. Anticommunism was, of course, central to West European social and political life in the post-war years. The French Right relied on it for its main “source of unity, chief recruitment tool, and ideological bedrock” (p. 93). In existing historiography on the subject, this post-war anticommunism is usually framed as an outgrowth of the wider Cold War context, a current moulded by American ideological influence and the new political paradigms of anti-totalitarianism and antiSovietism; earlier discourses of anticommunism are, by contrast, assumed to have fallen into obsolescence. Clift, however, rebels against this dominant interpretation and the rupture it posits. His argument is based on extensive evidence showing that earlier anticommunist discourses persisted into the post-war period and even retained their dominance in some walks of French civil society. Clift particularly focuses on an image of communism as an anarchic, antisocial force – an image whose roots go back to the early 19th century and which continued to inform anticommunism throughout the first half of the 20th, and even beyond. That historiography has failed to notice this discursive persistence is attributed by Clift to its overwhelming focus on the anticommunism of political elites and intellectuals – the very groups responsible for developing the new discursive frameworks of anti-totalitarianism and anti-Sovietism mentioned earlier. Meanwhile, by changing perspective and looking at the anticommunism of a lower tier of French associational life (e. g., the scout movement, agricultural organisations, middle-class organisations), Clift demonstrates how unrepresentative this dominant periodization is of French society at large. In our next two chapters, case studies of particular historical situations are combined with wider discussions of how periodization is practised in different branches of historical disciplines. The first of these, by Julia Secklehner, conducts a two-pronged critique of the main biases shaping the modern art history

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of Central Europe and the criteria on which its periodization is based. Secklehner points out the seemingly contradictory combination of an avant-garde-oriented Eurocentrism, on the one hand, and a reductionist “methodological nationalism”, on the other. Where the first leads art historians to focus their periodization on the most avant-gardist trends, with developments in Paris used as a normative standard against which these are measured, the second causes them to treat the 20th-century nation-state as the principal meaningful unit within which artistic developments occur and to construct singular national narratives to go with these units. The effect of these biases has been to marginalise those artists who fell outside the artistic movements that art history has deemed most avant-gardist and, therefore, prototypical in a given period, as well as those “who moved between different national spaces – hence, across different national narratives of art” (p. 124) (whilst simultaneously privileging those international entanglements that tied artistic peripheries to the Parisian metropole). Secklehner illustrates these blind spots through a case study focusing on Anna Lesznai (1885 – 1966), an upper-class Hungarian-Jewish artist and member of Budapest’s pre-1919 intellectual and artistic avant-garde. In the 1910s, Lesznai’s work drew extensively on folk art practices, in line with turn-of-the-century trends in Hungarian art towards the valorisation of traditional crafts and the pursuit of a national style (even if the latter was not an aim that Lesznai shared). Having participated in the short-lived revolutionary government of Béla Kun, in 1919 Lesznai left Hungary for fear of political persecution; she would spend the next decade working as an artist in rural Czechoslovakia and Vienna where – as Secklehner shows – her artistic production engaged with new artistic trends whilst maintaining its fascination with folk motifs, rural themes and natural harmony and continuing to inspire acclaim. Despite the clear continuities that characterised Lesznai’s art, her partial adaptation to changing artistic tendencies and her work’s enduring popularity after 1918, art-historical narratives have overwhelmingly focused on her work in the 1910s, framing Lesznai almost exclusively as an exemplar of pre-war Hungarian modernism. As Secklehner argues, the occlusion of Lesznai’s subsequent work testifies to the blinkering effect of the norms governing the periodization of art history. As long as Lesznai’s work suited a national narrative of art and her artistic concerns corresponded to those that the dominant narrative has deemed progressive, it was possible for the canon to accommodate her. By contrast, as soon as her artistic style no longer reflected the interests of the self-proclaimed avant-garde and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and her own post-imperial lifestyle had made her difficult to classify in national terms, Lesznai’s place in the canon would be lost. Next, Aleksei Lokhmatov’s chapter addresses the peculiarity of periodization in intellectual history. Rather than critique existing practices within this sub-

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field, Lokhmatov sets out to illustrate the tension between the “peculiar properties of [intellectual history’s] source base and research questions” (p. 151), on the one hand, and the politically centred, “statist” norms of periodization that prevail in most popular historical narratives, on the other. This tension is best reflected in the way different kinds of history treat political change: whereas for more mainstream historical narratives “political events change ‘reality’, dividing history into ‘before’ and ‘after’ stages” (p. 152), for intellectual historians political changes are of interest “only insofar as they become the basis for intellectuals’ personal experiences and the subject of their reflections” (p. 152). Making the two even harder to reconcile is the fact that intellectual processes are neither entirely in sync with political changes – shaped as they are by intellectuals’ previous experiences and the intellectual traditions to which they adhere – nor with other simultaneous processes in different intellectual traditions. Thus, in any given period and any given society, intellectual historians are almost bound to encounter a plurality of different understandings and descriptions of the “current moment” and of its relationship to the past and future. As Lokhmatov proceeds to show in his case study of Polish political thought after 1945, this is so even in societies which are both in the process of undergoing highly dramatic political change and in which the limits of what is politically sayable – and hence the limits on “temporal” pluralism – are tightening. Lokhmatov illustrates this by comparing three groups of intellectuals, all of whom played central roles in the immediate post-war public sphere. The first of these, a loose group of Marxisant café intellectuals before the war, saw their status utterly transformed after 1944 when they were invited to partake in the development of the cultural programme for the new Polish state. In the process, these intellectuals – now grouped around the influential Kuźnica journal – both changed their ideas and developed an acute awareness of the novelty of the post-1945 moment. Meanwhile, Lokhmatov’s second group, a Catholic collective centred around the figure of Zygmunt Kaczyński, pursued a maximalist political programme that mirrored, both in form and content, the ambitions of pre-war social Catholicism. As Lokhmatov argues, this group’s unreconstructed maximalism reflected an assumption that post-war sociopolitical conditions were sufficiently continuous with pre-1939 Poland as to justify the continuation of earlier ideas and strategies. Finally, Lokhmatov considers the case of Bolesław Piasecki, a radical nationalist before 1939 who understood the novelty of the post-1945 moment and, consequently, “translated” his ideas such as to make them acceptable to the new regime, without however sacrificing their core elements. Thus, three groups, three temporalities and three different periodizations. Lokhmatov’s desire to displace the automatic primacy of political periodization is shared by Alessia Benedetti’s chapter on the critical reception of Dante’s

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Divine Comedy in Russia from the beginning of the 19th century to the early years of Soviet rule. As Benedetti convincingly shows, this is not a subject of merely antiquarian interest. Familiarity with Dante was astonishingly high in educated Russian circles throughout this “long” century. Furthermore, debates about Dante invariably reflected the imprint of wider cultural and ideological developments, making them a useful window – or “clue”, to use the language of microhistory – into Russian cultural history more generally. The history of Dante’s reception, however, is not exclusively one of cultural change. After the Bolsheviks came to power, the need to develop a cultural programme for a new age whilst confronting the legacy of 19th-century culture became a pressing concern for the new revolutionary elite. Debates about the role of classic literature in the new society raged. However, though they were oriented towards the future, these debates were in many ways shaped by the same concerns that had motivated and divided the Russian intelligentsia over the preceding half-century. Debates about Dante after 1917 illustrate these legacies excellently: the attitudes to literature and to Dante that guided Bolsheviks in these discussions frequently bore strong similarities to the various positions formulated during the 19th century. Even conflicts between rival views of Dante were configured along similar lines to those that had pitched earlier strands of literary opinion against one another. Whilst we cannot always know how far Bolsheviks were aware of these cultural precedents, Benedetti also finds instances in which Bolsheviks clearly did see themselves as engaged in cultural debates not just with other Bolsheviks but with the echoes of long-dead participants of 19th-century literary discussions. Encompassing a similarly long stretch of time, Andrea Talabér’s chapter examines the vicissitudes of established national days in Czechoslovakia and Hungary over the course of the 20th century, a period marked in both countries by frequent and radical episodes of regime change. Taking control of political symbolism and national memory is often thought to be a priority for incoming revolutionary regimes. As Talabér shows, however, the existence of established national traditions, and the affective loyalties and identity structures attached to them placed significant constraints on new regimes’ freedom to create their own symbolic politics. Thus, radical political discontinuities in the 20th century were often accompanied by continuities in the symbolic sphere. At the same time, new regimes never accepted pre-existing national traditions passively, ensuring that these traditions’ reproduction was always as much the site of political manipulation and innovation as of continuity. Talabér’s chapter focuses on holidays dedicated to nationally significant medieval saints and heroes, contrasting their divergent fates in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Whilst in Hungary the celebration of St Stephen survived the entire 20th century, with only one short-lived attempt to suppress it, in Czechoslovakia

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successive regimes ultimately proved successful at side-lining, and even abolishing, the cults of St John of Nepomuk, St Wenceslas and Jan Hus. Talabér attributes these divergent outcomes to differences between the Czechoslovak and Hungarian polities and the roles that national days performed within them. On the one hand, St Stephen constituted a largely supra-partisan symbol of Hungarian statehood. This granted his cult political malleability and broad social loyalty, increasing its capacity for survival. By contrast, all of the aforementioned Czech figures were fettered with partisan/confessional associations which limited both their symbolic elasticity and the breadth of loyalties they commanded, ultimately making it easier for them to be toppled. By way of an epilogue, Ritchie Robertson concludes this volume with a series of wide-ranging meditations on the history, varieties and pitfalls of periodization. His chapter starts with a whistle-stop account of the different ways Europeans have classified time and divided history since late antiquity. He proceeds to show the debt owed by contemporary practices of periodization to 19th-century historicism, as well as the potentially blinkering and distorting effects of this orientation to the past. What follows next is an erudite exploration of the different forms that “historicist” periodization can take and the various ways – both weak and strong – that unity can be looked for and imposed on periods. Though at times Robertson comes close to advocating what he calls the “network model” of the period, which he illustrates with examples from the study of modernism, ultimately all models are shown to be wanting. Instead of offering general solutions, Robertson concludes – in the same broadly sceptical spirit that characterises the rest of this book – with a call for scholars not to “take period concepts and period boundaries too seriously”. It is at this point, however, that Robertson also casually points out a virtue of periodization that few ever notice: its aesthetic value. Quite simply, whatever its faults, periodization helps to give colour to the past and to make its contemplation more enjoyable. Even if its truth-value is limited, we may still be better off with it than without it. Utility vs artificiality, once more.

Jan A. Burek

Chapter 1 History Seems Different from the Shop Floor. A Micro-Historical Challenge to Established Caesurae in the History of 20th-Century Poland: Transwar Continuities in Żyrardów In an interview given in 2017, Piotr Gontarczyk, a scholar closely tied to the ruling national-conservative government of Poland and author of the only post-1989 monograph on the Polish Workers’ Party (as the party of Polish communists¹ was known between 1942 and 1948; henceforth PPR), claimed that: “the PPR was not a party, but a diversionary commando. It was not Polish, but Soviet. It had nothing to do with Polish workers.” He went on to describe the PPR as a “posse” made up of “Soviet soldiers who had escaped from German internment, runaways from the ghetto, and pre-war criminal gang members”.² In the perspective outlined by Gontarczyk, the post-war Polish regime is considered to have been designed by the Soviets and implemented by communists who were themselves Sovietized, Jewish and uprooted from Polish society. There is, by implication, no need for historians to look for the overarching continuities between the pre- and post-war periods, as the organizations and people who established the post-war regime were “new”, having been confined to the absolute margins of political and social life before the war. A chronological boundary is consequently set during the Second World War and treated as an almost impenetrable barrier. The narrative that follows also diminishes the agency of Polish communists, turning them into the mere executors of Soviet orders. And whilst in this interview Gontarczyk’s opinions were expressed in a particularly appalling anti-Semitic manner (note the levelling of the “run-aways from the

 The word “communist” will be lowercased in this chapter unless in reference to a party (or this party’s members) which carried the adjective “Communist” in its name. Therefore, the members of the Polish Workers’ Party will be referred to as communists, while the members of the Communist Party of Poland as Communists. The same rule goes for the word “socialist”.  P. Gontarczyk, Dr Piotr Gontarczyk: pomysł i koncepcja działania PPR była całkowicie sowiecka, interview by M. Szukała, https://dzieje.pl/aktualnosci/dr-piotr-gontarczyk-pomysl-i-koncepcjadzialania-ppr-byla-calkowicie-sowiecka (accessed 23 Nov. 2018). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636000-002

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ghetto” with “pre-war criminal gangs”, for instance), in their fundamental content they are not an exception in Polish historiography. The remarks cited above may, in fact, be seen as an example, albeit an extreme one, of a larger problem permeating historical research on Central and Eastern Europe during the state socialist period. The methodological shift towards social and cultural history which affected the historiography of the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s also influenced scholarship on state socialism in East-Central Europe. A significant portion of Western researchers, joined since the late 1990s by some of their Eastern European counterparts, turned their attention from the top-down study of state socialist regimes and their apparatuses of oppression to focus instead on the analysis of everyday practices and discourses. Surprisingly, this turn to the everyday, private, and oftentimes individual did not produce many studies crossing the chronological boundary of the war.³ Instead, the caesurae of research have remained anchored in political events. In line with this tendency, the Second World War has usually been assumed to constitute a turning point in the cultural and social labour history of East-Central Europe, the disciplinary subfield to which the present chapter – a case study of transwar continuities in the life and labour politics of one industrial Polish town – belongs. As I shall try to show, the pre-war and wartime evolution of working-class ideas and practices, as well as their relationship with socialist and communist political organizations, remains – in a manner representative of a more general historiographical pattern – almost completely ignored in the historiography of post-war East-Central Europe. At first glance, the scholarly neglect of such potential genealogies for postwar practices may appear surprising. Post-1989 scholarship has frequently treated working-class traditions as a determining factor in shaping both workers’ opposition to Soviet-style policies on the shop floor and post-war relationships between workers and communists. However, contrary to what this emphasis on historical legacies might lead one to expect, the working-class traditions that are assigned such importance have rarely been historicized. Instead of looking for historical context in the decades immediately prior to state socialism (i. e. the interwar period), historical accounts have searched for the roots of working-class traditions in pre-modern times. This has involved invoking notions

 There are naturally exceptions, particularly in Germany, where scholars moved on to write narratives that bridged the Second World War. P. Heumos, “Workers under Communist Rule: Research in the Former Socialist Countries of Eastern-Central and South-Eastern Europe and in the Federal Republic of Germany”, International Review of Social History, 55/1 (2010), pp. 108 – 109.

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such as the “moral economy […] as articulated by E. P. Thompson and others”⁴ or “long traditions reaching back to the peasant uprisings of the late Middle Ages”⁵. The pre-modern past, however, can hardly be expected to have had a direct, unmediated influence on post-war societies. Invocations of it provide a timeless – almost mythical – rather than historical frame of reference. An appeal to such a mythical past de-historicises the community under study, instead of historicising it. For instance, even if the workers from Łódź discussed by Padraic Kenney were driven by ideas rooted in a pre-modern moral economy, Kenney neglects to show the concrete links tying pre-modern forms of communal ethics to the more recent national(ist), religious, Socialist etc. ideas espoused by many mid-20th-century workers. Similarly, the 1951 Wismut Uprising discussed by Andrew Port might very well have contained traditional elements that had persisted among German workers and peasants since the Middle Ages; nevertheless, for the transmission of such forms of protest to occur, these elements would have had to be present in more modern instances of protest as well – something that Port fails to show or investigate.⁶ Whilst the failure to investigate possible pre-war and wartime genealogies may appear surprising in the case of more recent historiography, it is much less so if we limit our focus to Polish historiography. Here, the problem of lost continuity is deeply rooted, having emerged soon after the end of the Second World War and persisted as a result of political pressures. During the Stalinist period, when the ruling party exercised direct control over Polish academia, the study of interwar labour history⁷ was not welcome. Even a monograph on the interwar labour movement produced by the party’s own Department of History in the years 1949 – 1951 was prevented from publication by the censors.⁸ This erasure of interwar labour history was dictated by two considerations. Firstly, the original Communist Party of Poland (Komunistyczna Partia Polski; henceforth KPP) had been dissolved by the Comintern in 1938 and most of its leaders murdered in the Great Purge. Although the surviving Polish communists  P. Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945 – 1950 (Ithaca, 1997), p. 5.  A. Port, “When Workers Rumbled: The Wismut Upheaval of August 1951 in East Germany”, Social History, 22/2 (1997), p. 154.  See also: G. Eley, “Labor History, Social History, “Alltagsgeschichte”: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday–a New Direction for German Social History?”, The Journal of Modern History, 61/2 (1989), pp. 306 – 308.  Understood as the institutional history of the workers’ movement (historia ruchu robotniczego). Social and cultural labour history was virtually non-existent before the mid-1970s in Poland.  T. Siewierski, “Specyfika badań nad tzw. ruchem robotniczym w historiografii PRL. Zarys problemu”, in K. Dworaczek and Ł. Kamiński (eds), Letnia Szkoła Historii Najnowszej 2012. Referaty (Warszawa, 2013), p. 179.

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were given Stalin’s permission to form the PPR in 1942, pre-war KPP leaders were not rehabilitated and the new party, the PPR, was forced to take a name that dissociated it from its pre-war counterpart. After 1945 the KPP’s legacy was marginalized and its history rarely discussed. The new state leaders were forced to search for roots and legitimacy in pre-communist radical labour organizations instead. The second consideration contributing to the erasure of interwar labour history was the suppression of the history of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna; henceforth PPS) – the largest working-class party of interwar Poland. In the first post-war years, the PPS had been not only allowed but even encouraged by the Soviets to operate in Poland, as part of a communist-dominated left-wing coalition. By late 1948, however, the PPS had been forced to merge with the PPR, following a fate similar to other socialist parties in the region, to form the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, henceforth PZPR), the communist party that governed Poland until 1989. There were initially disagreements amongst communist leaders and the scholars associated with them over how the socialist legacy should be treated,⁹ but these disagreements were quickly resolved and the orthodox view rooted in the prewar Comintern’s equation of social democracy with “social fascism” entrenched. As a result, the PPS was deemed reactionary, making the study of its ideology and organization politically unwise. Following the liberalization of the communist regime around 1956, new attempts were made to write histories of the interwar labour movement. Nevertheless, these would remain fragmented and cautious in tying the pre- and post-war periods.¹⁰ Moreover, the notion of ruch robotniczy (“the labour movement”) would be reserved for monographs dealing with the KPP and its presumed predecessors.¹¹ The interwar Socialists were studied separately and, therefore, excluded from the general history of the labour movement.¹²

 K. Losson, “Czy KPP była patriotyczna? Dyskusja w Wydziale Historii Partii wokół referatu Tadeusza Daniszewskiego na temat “sprawy niepodległości w ruchu robotniczym””, Dzieje Najnowsze, 49/3 (2017), pp. 145 – 242.  For one of the few exceptions see J. Tomicki, Polska Partia Socjalistyczna 1892 – 1948 (Warszawa, 1983).  This includes both the institutional predecessors of the KPP, i. e. the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (Socjal-Demokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy) and the Polish Socialist Party – Left (PPS – Lewica) that in 1918 merged to form what would eventually become the KPP, and early Socialist organizations such as the 19th-century Social-Revolutionary Party “Proletariat” (Socjalno-Rewolucyjna Partia “Proletariat”).  Siewierski, “Specyfika badan”, p. 177. Non-Marxist labour organizations also naturally remained outside the scope of scholarship on the ruch robotniczy.

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Whilst not quite reproducing the propagandistic arguments of their predecessors, scholars writing after the collapse of state socialism in Poland would also go on to adopt the axiom of broken continuity. In the most radical variant of this historiographical framing, not only communists, but even post-war Socialists, have been treated as alien to the Polish working class. The crucial fact used to support this view is that the post-war PPS was created by a small group of radical socialists without the approval of the largest clandestine socialist organization operating within Poland during the war (the WRN – short for “Liberty, Equality, Independence”) or indeed of the Socialist members of the Londonbased Polish government-in-exile. Post-war PPS members have on these grounds been considered “faux-Socialists”, communist agents who had no claim to the tradition of the interwar PPS.¹³ In this view, the post-war PPS was nothing but a Soviet scheme created to infiltrate the Polish progressive intelligentsia and Socialist workers and was, thus, as alien to Polish society as the communists themselves.¹⁴ In more nuanced post-1989 historical narratives, by contrast, the post-war PPS has been seen as well-established in the working-class environment, resulting in its conflation with the labour movement in toto. Implied in this is the PPS’ juxtaposition with the communists who, in turn, are regarded as an authoritarian and external force capable of capturing only unexperienced rural migrant labour through violence, corruption, and manipulation. In this variant of the story of broken continuity it is, therefore, the communists, rather than the post-war Socialists, who are excluded from the continuous transwar history of the labour movement. A case in point is provided by the work of Jędrzej Chumiński, one of the leading Polish historians of labour in the post-war era. In his meticulous studies, Chumiński roots the differences between those who supported the Socialist and communist parties after 1945 in the economic and social background of the workers in question. He divides Polish workers into two general categories: on

 A 1980s samizdat publication by Jerzy Holzer (a prominent historian of the socialist movement) is a good example here. J. Holzer, Agonia PPS: socjaliści polscy w sojuszu z PPR 1944 – 1948 (s.l., 1985).  However, in reality, as early as mid-1945 the post-war PPS had managed to re-establish its independence and attract many pre-war Socialist leaders and organizers. See R. Spałek, “Między pragmatyzmem a zdradą. Zawłaszczenie PPS w kraju (1944– 1948)”, in R. Spałek (ed), Polska Partia Socjalistyczna: dlaczego się nie udało?: szkice, polemiki, wspomnienia, (Warszawa, 2010), pp. 145 – 242. Although the author also uses the term “faux-PPS”, he nevertheless shows how the faux-PPS became an independent force (only to be disarmed once more in late 1948 before the forced merger with the PPR).

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the one hand, a small and disappearing, relatively well-off, skilled, urban working class with experience of work in the pre-war factories, and, on the other hand, the uneducated, poor migrants from the countryside who flocked to towns and cities after 1945 and lacked ties to existing worker cultures.¹⁵ Differentiating between the new and old working class is not exclusive to the historiography of East-Central Europe under communist rule.¹⁶ However, Chumiński does not stop at this distinction, going onto argue that the two groups also espoused antithetic world-views or “personalities”. Whilst the former group supported the Socialist Party due to its innate democratic instincts, the latter possessed “authoritarian personalities” and were therefore easily manipulated by the PPR. This argument, certainly more complex and nuanced than Gontarczyk’s narrative, is nonetheless based on a similar assumption. The communists are once again regarded as an external force with no connection to the developed working class, a force capable only of finding support – by means of bribery and intimidation – amongst inexperienced workers who lacked ties to pre-war labour culture (treated as a homogeneous entity by the author).¹⁷ For Chumiński, therefore, there is no reason to look for transwar continuities in the communist support base or in the discourses used by communists to attract workers. In this chapter, I would like to propose an alternative model. I will show that the war did not constitute an absolute break in Polish labour history. The labour movement survived the invasion by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 and the victorious westward march of the Red Army five years later. The ideas that the socialist and communist organizations had promoted before the war remained at the core of their institutional identities or, at the very least, remained relevant to their members. Instead of treating World War II as an absolute caesura, I push this caesura towards the early 1950s. Based on the example of Żyrardów, an industrial town in Central Poland, I show how generational change and the introduction of fully developed Stalinist policies after 1948 played a much greater role – compared to the war – in ending personal, ideological,

 J. Chumiński, Robotnicy polscy 1945 – 1956: “Stary” i “nowy” ośrodek przemysłowy na przykładzie Krakowa i Wrocławia (Wrocław, 2015), pp. 10 – 11. See also: J. Chumiński, “Autorytaryzm a wybory polityczne robotników polskich (1945 – 1948),” Dzieje Najnowsze : kwartalnik poświęcony historii XX wieku, 38/1 (2006), pp. 89 – 106.  In the Polish context this distinction already appeared in sociological works from the early 1960s, e. g. A. Stojak, Studium o górnikach kopalni “Janina” w Libiążu 1905 – 1960 (Łódź, 1964), pp. 82– 92.  Chumiński, Robotnicy polscy, pp. 10 – 11, 155 – 156. For all my reservations about his thesis, I must stress here that Chumiński is a meticulous scholar who does not in any way invoke antiSemitic clichés – something that cannot be said about Gontarczyk.

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and institutional continuities within the Polish labour movement as well as continuities in forms of work organization. There is no denying that World War II constitutes an important watershed in the history of East-Central Europe. Acknowledging its importance does not, however, necessarily mean reifying it in the form an impenetrable caesura. Defining World War II as a caesura may in fact impair scholarly work, blurring significant continuities that become clear once we expand the period of analysis to include the years both before and after 1945. I must add here that, although a joint analysis of both the socialist and communist strains of the labour movement would bring even more revealing outcomes, due to space constraints and for the clarity of the argument I focus in this chapter exclusively on continuities concerning the communist movement and its relationship with the working class and changes in work organization. My insistence on looking back to the years before 1939 in order to understand the post-war period is not merely strategic and utilitarian, designed – that is – to contest current interpretations of the role of working-class organizations in post-war Poland. Rather, my alternative periodization was originally inspired by how historical actors, in this case the workers of Żyrardów, an industrial town in Central Poland, themselves comprehended the history that they lived through. Therefore, my questioning of World War II as a caesura follows the perspective of Żyrardów’s inhabitants who, as we shall see, understood the war less as a singular rupture than a constituent part of larger processes. Building on insights derived from the biographical level, I show that the caesura of the war has limited application with regards to local history. Finally, my chapter will also demonstrate significant transwar continuities in the labour and political regimes of Żyrardów – continuities that are likely to apply at the national or even international level, indicating the need to revise caesuras not just in the study of the individual or at the local level, but also in a more general analysis.

I Framing World War II in the micro-history of Żyrardów The study of labour history in East-Central Europe since the 1980s and, in particular, after the fall of the Iron Curtain is deeply indebted to various history from below approaches, the most influential being the German history of the everyday or Alltagsgeschichte, ¹⁸ the extended case method of Michael Burawoy,¹⁹  A. Lüdtke, “Introduction” in W. Templer and A. Lüdtke (eds), The History of Everyday Life:

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and revisionist and post-revisionist Soviet history.²⁰ These approaches called for the study of informal, everyday practices and ideologies which are much easier to capture at the local level.²¹ I, too, wish to focus on the local level, although my main inspiration is drawn from Italian micro-history, an approach which has rarely been applied to the labour history of East-Central Europe. The crux of micro-history, at least in its Ginzburgian form, lies in building up theory on the basis of sources and not the other way around, and in the conviction that in small-scale, seemingly marginal examples or “clues” one can find more general patterns.²² I do not believe that metanarratives and theories are altogether useless or detrimental to historical knowledge, as some post-structuralist adherents of micro-history contend,²³ and this was certainly never Carlo Ginzburg’s position. At the same time, micro-historical writing is undoubtedly less dependent on theory compared to approaches like Alltagsgeschichte or the extended case method. The industrial town of Żyrardów provides my “Ariadne’s thread”²⁴ – to use Carlo Ginzburg’s and Carlo Poni’s metaphor – in this endeavour. The relatively small size of the town (it never grew above fifty thousand inhabitants) and its provincial character make it feasible to study Żyrardów from different perspectives, focusing even on the scale of personal experience and on long periods of time. Just as Ariadne’s thread guided Theseus through the labyrinth, so the names of Żyrardów, its inhabitants, and institutions guided me through my ar-

Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, (Princeton, 1995); P. Heumos, “Workers under Communist Rule”, p. 108.  M. Burawoy, The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition (Berkeley, 2009). I single out Burawoy mainly because the influential work of M. Pittaway on Hungary was inspired by his research.  S. Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History”, History and Theory, 46/4 (2007), pp. 77– 91. The revisionist approach was introduced into Polish labour history by D. Jarosz. See: D. Jarosz, Polacy a stalinizm 1948 – 1956 (Warszawa, 2000), pp. 5 – 8.  This resulted in many case studies of post-war Polish labour history. Examples include Kenney, Rebuilding Poland; Chumiński, Robotnicy polscy; Malgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge, 2010); K. Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949 – 56 (Ithaca, 2013); Błażej Brzostek, Robotnicy Warszawy (Warszawa, 2002).  C. Ginzburg and A. Davin, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method”, History Workshop Journal, 9 (1980), pp. 5 – 36.  SG Magnússon, “The Singularization of History: Social History and Microhistory within the Postmodern State of Knowledge”, Journal of Social History, 36/3 (2003), pp. 701– 735.  C. Ginzburg and C. Poni, “The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historiographic Marketplace”, in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe. Selections from Quaderni storici, 1991, 5.

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chival research, each providing their own caesurae that rarely matched up with conventional historical watersheds. The selection of Żyrardów for this micro-historical study is not accidental or based solely on its appropriate size and location. Indeed, Żyrardów is certainly not representative of a middle-sized Polish town. Nonetheless, I believe that it is relevant and that its relevance lies precisely in its particularity.²⁵ Thanks to the town’s distinct character I have been able to pinpoint continuities that, elsewhere, might not stand out as much or could even be overshadowed by developments on the national level. The particularity of Żyrardów derives mainly from the fact that this textile industry centre was for the most part built by the owners of its main – and for a long time only – factory. Indeed, Żyrardów constituted the most fully developed example of a model company town in the pre-1914 Polish lands.²⁶ This distinction has a few important consequences for the present study. First, the concentration of the town’s entire life around a single factory has resulted in a relatively large volume of primary sources concerned with matters relating to the factory and its workers. Second, the stabilizing effect that the company town system had on Żyrardów’s population ensured the uninterrupted development of its working-class culture across various generations. Third, the segregation of the town’s population based on religious affiliation was established by the town’s planners and factory owners, and persisted long after they were gone. This led to the development of an overwhelmingly Polish working class and a labour movement dominated by Polish workers which, in turn, left Żyrardów’s industrial working class and its institutions less affected by the Holocaust. None, or at least very few, of the three thousand Jewish Żyrardowians who were murdered by the Nazis during the war had worked in the town’s main factory.²⁷ The town’s labour leaders, both Socialist and Communist, were predominantly of Polish, Czech or German origin and, hence, largely survived the occupation. Finally, the relatively provincial character of Żyrardów and the non-strategic character of its industry (the town’s main factory produced cotton and linen textiles) lessened disciplinary pressure from the national communist party apparatus and the political police in the initial post-war years, allowing for more political lib-

 C. Ginzburg and C. Poni, pp. 7– 8. On the relevance of the exceptional see also: E. Grendi, “Micro-analyse et histoire sociale”, Écrire l’histoire. Histoire, Littérature, Esthétique, 3 (2009), p. 72.  On the development of the company town in Żyrardów see: K. Zwoliński, Zakłady Żyrardowskie w latach 1885 – 1915 (Warszawa, 1979).  M. Bauman, “Jewish Social and Political Organizations”, in M. Bernstein (ed), Memorial Book of Zyrardow, Amshinov and Viskit, http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/zyrardow/zyr138.html (accessed 4 Jan. 2017).

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erty compared to other industrial areas such as the coal basins of Dąbrowa and Silesia. All these circumstances, while certainly making Żyrardów an unusual case study, allow us to see more clearly the continuities in working-class culture and in the organization of the working-class movement that crossed the caesura of World War II. As mentioned above, considering history from the viewpoint of the historical actors themselves allows us to see World War II not only as a break, but also as part of larger processes. How exactly did these actors, then, understand their experience of the war and occupation in relation to past events? In April 1945, the official journal of the PPR committee in Żyrardów, in a front-page editorial entitled “The Day of Resurrection”, likened the end of the German occupation to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and to the “return of the spring” after a long winter.²⁸ The German invasion and the liberation that followed were, therefore, understood by the anonymous author in a cyclical rather than linear manner. This cyclical manner of thinking about the war can also be noted in other sources. The occupation of Żyrardów by Imperial Germany in the years 1916 – 1918 and the revolutionary fervour of 1918 – 1919 were fresh memories for many of the town’s inhabitants and provided a framework of reference for its Polish citizens. In 1944, Żyrardów’s most famous intellectual, Paweł Hulka-Laskowski, noted how stoical his working-class colleague was in the face of Nazi occupation. At one point, Hulka’s companion rhetorically asked him: “germans [sic] come, germans go, it’s not the first time, is it?”²⁹ The same author also described how working-class women had asked him to write petitions to the German authorities on their behalf, just as he had done during the first German occupation. These women believed that both occupations were essentially the same.³⁰ Similarly, former members of the KPP understood the liberation of 1945 not as an entirely new situation, but rather as a repetition of the events that had taken place in 1918 – 1919, and as a chance to correct the errors made at that time. In June 1945, for example, at the general meeting of Żyrardów’s PPR, one of the veterans of the Communist movement called on his colleagues to engage more closely with elections to the boards of workers’ cooperatives because “democracy might once again go off the rails” as it did in 1919.³¹

 “Dzień Zmartwychwstania”, Głos Żyrardowa (1 April 1945), p. 1.  P. Hulka-Laskowski, Księżyc nad Cieszynem: (wspomnienie z lat niewoli i dni wyzwolenia) (Katowice, 1946), p. 213.  Hulka-Laskowski, Księżyc nad Cieszynem, p. 58.  Minutes from the general assembly of the members of the Polish Workers’ Party, 26 June 1945, State Archive in Warsaw (APW), Milanówek Branch (OM), Town Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party in Żyrardów (KM PPR), File 1.

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Clearly, then, World War II did not necessarily constitute an absolute break in the lives of Żyrardów’s Polish working-class inhabitants or, indeed, in the town’s history more broadly. These events, while certainly salient and traumatic, were also understood as elements of a greater cycle that had begun before World War I. Within this narrative, an alternative caesura emerges: the loss of control over the town’s main factory by its long-time owners – the Dittrich family – in the early 20th century and its subsequent shutdown during World War I. In interviews collected by ethnographers as late as the second half of the 1970s, the Dittrichs’ rule was remembered as Żyrardów’s golden era, and what followed as the town’s decline and the accompanying impoverishment of its population.³² Similar sentiments also became pronounced in the public discourse surrounding Żyrardów during the severe crisis of the late 1920s and 1930s,³³ and also re-surfaced during the brief period of political liberalization in 1956.³⁴ I do not claim here that looking at history from the perspective of its actors is enough to dethrone the historiographical narrative or that the narrative proposed above was the only or even the dominant one amongst historical actors. Moreover, the nostalgic narrative recounting the Dittrich-era rise and post-Dittrich fall of Żyrardów is certainly too simplistic to provide an alternative model to academic understandings of history. Nevertheless, the idea of treating pre-war and post-war times as a single post-Dittrich period is an illuminating one, allowing us to notice multiple processes either experienced or observed by historical actors that would otherwise have been obscured by the assumed importance of the war as a caesura.

II Transwar biographies, ideological continuities and the persistence of managerial techniques The weakness of the Communist movement in pre-war Poland is taken for granted in historiography and rarely problematized. Scholars assume that interwar Communists received most of their support from ethnic minorities, a sizeable

 A. Woźniak, Dittrichowie a kultura robotnicza Żyrardowa (Żyrardów, 1983), pp. 9 – 11.  Rada Miejska Żyrardowa, Przyczyny i skutki obecnego upadku Żyrardowa. Memorjał Rady Miejskiej i Magistratu m. Żyrardowa ku poinformowaniu władz państwowych, Sejmu i Prasy (Żyrardów, 1927), pp. 11– 12. Żyrardów’s workers testifying at a trial in the 1930s also shared this feeling. “Żyrardów”, Robotnik (29 Oct. 1932), p. 1.  E. g. jal, “Obrazki z dawnego Żyrardowa. “Filantropia” mieszkaniowa Dittricha i Hiellego”, Życie Żyrardowa (19 May 1956), p. 3.

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part of Poland’s population before the Holocaust and the post-1945 changes to the country’s borders, and that, even if the KPP had enjoyed some following among Polish workers, the party’s weak performances in national elections confirmed its marginal character. However, as Jeffrey Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg have shown, while the Communists in Poland’s predominantly Belarussian and Ukrainian easterly regions were indeed supported mostly by non-Polish voters, the Communist vote in what was formerly Congress Poland (i. e. the more western, predominantly Polish part of the former Russian partition) came from workers of all ethnicities.³⁵ Here, the KPP was very much a party of the working class – both Polish and Jewish – and not a party confined to national minorities. Despite the fact that it was illegal and thus had limited campaigning opportunities, the KPP rivalled the Socialists in popularity in these areas, at times even overtaking them in electoral support.³⁶ The KPP was certainly not a marginal party in Warsaw, Łódź, and a number of smaller industrial towns in Central Poland and the Zagłębie Coal Basin (with Żyrardów among them), although it struggled to expand its influence outside these highly industrialized enclaves. In Żyrardów, the share of votes won by the Communists went from 9.6 % in the parliamentary elections of 1922, to 13.5 % in those of 1928, and finally 13.7 % in the last, semifree elections of 1930, in which the Communists emerged as the biggest opposition force to the pro-governmental alliance in Żyrardów, ahead of both the nationalists and the centre-left coalition of the PPS and peasant parties.³⁷ In 1922, approximately 900 people voted Communist and six years later around 1600 people did the same. Given that the KPP was heavily persecuted in the late 1920s and the party’s ability to campaign seriously limited, these results show that it enjoyed a loyal and growing support base in Żyrardów. Support for the Communists in national elections was low in comparison to the results of the local elections in 1924, the only free local elections that the KPP took part in in Żyrardów. The KPP amassed 27.7 % of the vote, or 2207 in absolute

 J. Kopstein and J. Wittenberg, “Who Voted Communist? Reconsidering the Social Bases of Radicalism in Interwar Poland”, Slavic Review, 62/1 (2003), pp. 95 – 107.  For a comparison of PPS and KPP results in local elections see: R. Szwed, Polska Partia Socjalistyczna w wyborach samorządów terytorialnych w latach 1919 – 1939 (Częstochowa, 1993), pp. 41– 63.  One must note here, however, that the Communists owed their second place to the split in the Socialist movement which had resulted in the Socialist vote being divided between the oppositional PPS and the pro-governmental PPS-Frakcja. For analysis of electoral results in Warsaw voivodeship (which included Żyrardów) see: L. Hass, “Wpływy ugrupowań politycznych wśród ludności woj. warszawskiego w latach 1919 – 1922 w świetle wyborów sejmowych”, Rocznik Mazowiecki, 4 (1972), pp. 93 – 155 and subsequent parts of the same analysis in the next two volumes of Rocznik Mazowiecki (5 and 6).

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figures, and managed to form a minority government.³⁸ Behind this seemingly brief and sudden surge of support lay the fact that the KPP ran in Żyrardów on a local, radical, and uncompromising (although not revolutionary) platform. It also attempted to form a coalition with the Socialists ahead of the elections, showing a more realistic approach towards governing. Moreover, the party list was comprised of local activists who were well-known and valued by Żyrardów’s workers, as opposed to the centrally appointed candidates who represented the KPP in parliamentary elections. I believe that the 1924 results were not an outlier, but rather a sign of support for the local Communist organization that simply did not translate into support for the KPP at the national level. This argument is further supported by the fact that the Communists also managed to win an absolute majority in the elections to the board of the local healthcare fund in 1927,³⁹ while only gathering 13.5 % in the parliamentary elections a year later, as mentioned above. There is, however, no more direct evidence to confirm this thesis at the present stage. Support for the KPP in Żyrardów seemed to remain strong and even grow in the 1930s, with the party attracting a number of young workers and members of the unemployed. Due to the increasingly authoritarian character of the Polish state, however, even such imperfect measures of support as reliable election results are lacking for this period.⁴⁰ The dissolution of the KPP in 1938 and the German and Soviet invasions in 1939 put an end to communist mass politics in Żyrardów for the next six years. Could support for the communist movement survive these blows? During the war, the terror of the Nazi regime precluded the PPR from forming a larger local chapter, but small communist cells existed in Żyrardów’s main factory all the same, as the majority of Żyrardów’s loyal communists – in particular women activists – continued to work there. Communist trade unions were even formed, although they did not appear to engage in any activity. Additionally, the dissolution of the KPP and the Nazis’ subsequent introduction of conscripted labour forced the small group of former KPP functionaries who had not been employed in the factory, instead living off the party’s payroll for

 K. Zwoliński, “Wybory do Rady Miejskiej w Żyrardowie w 1924 r.”, Rocznik Mazowiecki, 4 (1972), p. 275.  M. Rajner, Wspomnienie, p. 22, Central Archive of Modern Records in Warsaw (AAN), Collection of Personal Files of Labor Activists (ZAODRR), File 4893.  This assessment is based on the post-war memoirs of communist activists and on police reports. See: J. Konar, “Strajk w Zakładach Żyrardowskich w 1926 r.”, in L. Grossfeld (ed), Z dziejów walk masowych klasy robotniczej w Polsce w latach 1918 – 1939 (Warszawa, 1964), pp. 101– 105.

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the best part of the interwar period, to return to the shop floor, thereby helping to strengthen the nascent PPR in the factory environment.⁴¹ The leaders and lower-tier activists of the PPR who reconstituted the communist movement during the occupation had been the KPP’s chief organizers during the interwar period. They were overwhelmingly working-class, and many of them were well-known to Żyrardowians due to their prominence in the local politics of the 1920s and 1930s. These same people remained in control of the party during the initial post-war years. As a former militant of the non-communist resistance would later recall while explaining the initial support for the PPR: “these were our [i. e. local] communists, from Żyrardów or Warsaw”.⁴² Furthermore, it was not only the top tier of the party and town administration that was filled with experienced ex-KPP functionaries. Many party activists who had organized workers in the textile factory since the 1920s remained employed as workers in the factory after the end of the occupation, continuing their political activity at the shop-floor level.⁴³ It was most likely thanks to these pre-existing structures and to the familiarity of individual communist activists among the town’s inhabitants that the PPR was quickly able to expand its membership. By early 1946, the PPR’s Żyrardów organization counted 700 members.⁴⁴ While this number greatly exceeded the maximum membership that the KPP had ever enjoyed in the town, it was still two or three times less than the communist electoral base in the late 1920s. This fact does not necessarily mean that the post-war organization was comprised solely of people who had been in the Communist orbit before the war. There was after all an inevitable generational turnover of in Żyrardów’s population, heightened by wartime losses. Nevertheless, I believe it shows how support for the PPR did not need to be built on the young country-dwellers who found work in industry in the post-war era. There was barely any migration to Żyrardów in the late 1940s: here, the reservoir of people who were at least sympathetic towards the communist movement at

 This account of the wartime communist movement is based mostly on the memoirs and oral histories of Marian Rajner, the first secretary of the PPR during the war and in the immediate post-war period. It is also based on other autobiographical materials and oral histories gathered in the Collection of Personal Acts of the Labour Movement Activists of the Central Archive of Modern Records in Warsaw, which were collected or produced by the employees of the PZPR’s Department of the History of the Party from the 1950s to the 1980s.  Interview with Ryszard Tadeusz Wiśniewski, Pilecki Institute in Warsaw, Recording DF/SE/ 1059 (30 Nov. 2019).  This assessment is based on the analysis of 20 personal files of Żyrardów’s communist activists from the ZAODRR.  Minutes from the Party town conference, 24.02.1946, APW, OM, KM PPR, File 1.

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various points in the 1920s and 1930s was large enough to account for the rapid growth in PPR membership in the immediate post-war years. The personal continuity in Żyrardów’s communist movement had a significant impact on the ideas and actions of the local PPR chapter. The PPR was not a homogenous entity. Ideological divisions dating back to the pre-war and wartime periods existed within its membership both at the national as well as the local level.⁴⁵ These splits manifested themselves in Żyrardów with particular intensity with regard to questions around workers’ self-management in the factories and the preservation of pre-war and wartime shop-floor hierarchies. The national policies of the party on these issues were ambiguous and often contradictory, as the party leadership was not unified on these questions and did not treat them as a priority.⁴⁶ This situation created an opportunity for Żyrardów activists to develop policies at the local level and imbue them with their own values, which were largely formed during the interwar period. The post-war Minister of Industry, Hilary Minc, a long-time member of the KPP as well as a high-ranking official in the Sanacja ⁴⁷ economic administration of the 1930s,⁴⁸ intended to preserve pre-war shop-floor hierarchies and, at least initially, the pre-war managerial staff. This, however, ran against the dominant sentiments among communist trade-unionists,⁴⁹ many rank-and-file members of the party, and even some other national party leaders, including its first secretary Władysław Gomułka.⁵⁰ Demands for a complete overhaul of existing power structures in the factories and for workplace democracy had featured in the communist movement’s propaganda since its very establishment in Poland. These issues were raised, albeit vaguely, in the programmatic documents of both the KPP⁵¹ and the PPR and, more importantly, became a part of the PPR’s polit-

 With regard to the divisions in the national party leadership see: R. Spałek, “U źródeł partii. Z dziejów konfliktów personalno-ideowych w kierownictwie PPR”, in M. Szumiło and M. Żukowski (eds), Elity komunistyczne w Polsce (Warszawa, 2015).  A. Werblan, Władysław Gomułka: sekretarz generalny PPR (Warszawa, 1988), pp. 461– 95. C. Bobrowski, Wspomnienia ze stulecia (Lublin, 1985), p. 160.  This is the name given to the interwar ruling camp formed after Józef Piłsudski’s military coup in 1926.  The staff in his ministry was made up of former Sanacja officials and representatives of prewar industrial management. Bobrowski, Wspomnienia ze stulecia, p. 159.  For more on the example of Łódź see: Kenney, Rebuilding Poland, pp. 51– 62.  M. Ożóg, Władysław Gomułka: biografia polityczna (Warszawa, 1989), vol. I, p. 130.  K. Trembicka, Między utopią a rzeczywistością: myśl polityczna Komunistycznej Partii Polski (1918 – 1938) (Lublin, 2007), p. 118. Workers’ self-management was also a central point of the programme of some Communist-controlled trade unions. See: Ożóg, Władysław Gomułka, p. 22.

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ical practice in late 1944 and early 1945. Not only did the PPR leadership support the establishment of factory committees – a form of collective workers’ industrial management, reminiscent of institutions that had existed under the same name during the revolutionary years of 1917– 1919 – but official party representatives were even dispatched ahead of the Red Army as it moved westward in order to encourage and assist in the organization of such committees. The Minister of Industry attempted to limit the prerogatives of these committees, issuing instructions that contradicted the actions and propaganda of party envoys. Nevertheless, until mid-1945, when Minc finally persuaded the rest of the national party leadership that these committees constituted a major disruption to economic reconstruction efforts, he would be largely unsuccessful in his attempts to undermine them.⁵² In Żyrardów, due to personal conflicts within the local communist organization, the tensions between ministerial plans and the ideas of local activists became acutely apparent. The Ministry-appointed director of the town’s main factory, Franciszek Biedrzycki, although himself one of the leaders of Żyrardów’s Communist movement in the 1920s, was disliked and mistrusted by most of the local party chapter. In the 1930s, after becoming the owner of a small shop, Biedrzycki cut all ties with the labour movement. Moreover, during the war he had initially refused to join the PPR, citing the party’s lack of respect for private property and only joining in the winter of 1944, when Soviet victory was imminent.⁵³ In the first months after the arrival of Soviet forces, the local PPR leadership tolerated and even encouraged the critique of the state-imposed industrial management coming from party members. The PPR did not possess any disciplinary bodies before the summer of 1945 when the Department of Party Control Committee was established.⁵⁴ Thus, at this point in time, local PPR chapters were under relatively little pressure to conform to the party line. The hostile relations between the director and the local party leadership created space for rank-andfile PPR members to criticize the policies implemented in the factory with greater freedom.

 J. Gołębiowski, Nacjonalizacja przemysłu w Polsce (Warszawa, 1965), pp. 16 – 23. See also: J. Chumiński, “Kształtowanie się form organizacyjnych i zasad programowych ruchu zawodowego i rad zakładowych w latach 1944– 1945”, Nauki Humanistyczne, 4 (1998), pp. 174– 179.  See Franciszek Biedrzycki’s (File 431) and Marian Rajner’s (File 4893) files in the ZAODRR.  M. Bednarczyk, “”Oczyścić Partię z elementów wrogich i obcych…”. Wojewódzka Komisja Kontroli Partyjnej Polskiej Partii Robotniczej w Lublinie w latach 1945 – 1948”, Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość, 27 (2016), pp. 327– 334.

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Biedrzycki, realizing that he was completely unprepared to serve as the factory’s director, followed the directives of the Ministry to the letter and quickly became reliant on his co-employees: managers and engineers with pre-war experience. This put the director further at odds with the local party organization. Biedrzycki was forced to fend off attempts to widen the powers of factory committees and remove pre-war staff from important posts, as well as contending with resistance to the introduction of unpopular ministerial policies. Interestingly, in response to increasing criticism from Biedrzycki’s party colleagues, who considered him to be anti-worker, the director developed a justification for his behaviour which diverged strongly from communist orthodoxy and was clearly indebted to Polish pre-war political discourse. In the discourse of the PPR’s national leadership, the state was treated as a channel through which “social” or “national” control over the economy was exercised and as a means of raising the welfare of the people and empowering the working class.⁵⁵ By contrast, in response to attacks at a local party meeting, Biedrzycki would argue that “the supposed exploitation of the worker is not against his interests, as it is necessary for the raising of the general welfare of the State”.⁵⁶ The state in his opinion was not an instrument of the proletariat and its organized avantgarde (i. e. the Communist Party) but an independent agent. Such a formulation was hardly a slip of the tongue. Biedrzycki was in fact invoking the central tenet of the 1930s authoritarian Sanacja ideology: the understanding of the state as an entity independent from the legitimization of society, with its own self-justified set of goals.⁵⁷ Sanacja ideology was much easier to reconcile with his new position than communism, and certainly more in line with the ideas presented by his new colleagues in factory management. By contrast, a faction in the PPR town committee grouped around the first secretary continued to push for greater prerogatives for factory committees even after, following the Minister of Industry’s advice, the national PPR leadership finally worked out a coherent policy in May 1945, which turned the committees into welfare offices with hardly any managerial power. Only after the party’s

 See Gomułka’s speech at the PPR plenum in February 1945. W. Gomułka, “Nowa sytuacja – nowe zadania”, in W. Gomułka, R. Zambrowski and H. Minc, Przemówienia na rozszerzonym plenum Komitetu Centralnego Polskiej Partii Robotniczej w lutym 1945 r. (Katowice, 1945), pp. 5 – 16. The nature of the socialist state was a topic of controversy within the Communist camp. No one, however, treated it as an entity independent from the party and the working class. For a brief description of this controversy: Werblan, Władysław Gomułka, pp. 464– 465.  Minutes from the general party meeting, 26 June 1945, APW, OM, KM PPR, File 1.  W. Paruch, Myśl polityczna obozu Piłsudczykowskiego, 1926 – 1939 (Lublin, 2005), pp. 215 – 217.

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regional authorities sent a special envoy to curb the local PPR initiatives did Żyrardów’s communist leaders comply and give up their open opposition to the new direction of party policy.⁵⁸ Nonetheless, the local PPR chapter continued to devise participatory measures which limited the power of factory management. For example, workers’ courts were established in response to the widespread stealing of factory materials. In these courts workers were to be judged by their peers rather than the state judicial system or factory management.⁵⁹ More in line with the PPR’s national policies, but certainly not with the ideas of the Minister of Industry and Biedrzycki, the local party chapter also tried to curb the power of foremen and shop directors in order to reduce the social distance between workers and their supervisors and, as mentioned above, eliminate the pre-war management by supplanting it with newly promoted workers. The idea of worker-run factories was, to a degree, used instrumentally in the intra-party power struggle between the local party leadership and Biedrzycki. Nevertheless, a belief in giving workers more agency in the workplace and challenging the authority of managers and foremen lay at the core of communist political culture and for many constituted the main reason for joining the communist movement. Participating in the management of factories during the Russian Revolution (many Żyrardowians worked in factories deep in the interior of the Russian Empire during World War I) or in the factory committees and workers’ council that existed in Żyrardów between 1918 and 1919 was a generational experience for most of the local communist activists. It was the empowerment they felt in connection to these experiences that often drove them to the communist movement.⁶⁰ In turn, the generation of activists who were too young to take part in the events of 1917– 1919 joined the movement in the late 1920s and 1930s, a time of rising tensions between workers and their supervisors, under the influence of Communist propaganda that underscored the violent and demeaning character of shop-floor hierarchies and the necessity of abolishing them.⁶¹ It is also worth pointing out that in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as Żyrardów’s factory limited employment and approached bankruptcy, the local KPP called for its

 Minutes from the Party town meeting, 11 June 1945, APW, OM, KM PPR, File 2.  Report of the Polish Workers’ Party town committee for the years 1946 – 1947, compiled by Marian Rajner, APW, OM, KM PPR, File 1; Minutes from the meeting of Party executive committee in Żyrardów, 12 Dec.1946, APW, OM, KM PPR, File 3.  This path to communism is vividly described in the memoirs of Stanisława Miszkiewiczowa. S. Miszkiewiczowa, Wspomnienia z Rosji (1915 – 1918), AAN, ZAODRR, File 8304.  See the illegal Communist journal Żyrardowiak, which was addressed to young workers – in particular women – and at least partially edited by them in the late 1920s and in the 1930s. Unfortunately, only two editions survived and are available in the archives of the Sejm Library.

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occupation and recovery by the workers. This stance differentiated the Communists from the PPS, which pushed in turn for nationalisation.⁶² In April 1945, a labour inspector reported that work conditions in Żyrardów had become as bad as they had been in the late 1920s and early 1930s.⁶³ This was the period of so-called “rejuvenation” and “rationalisation” – policies introduced after the new French owners took over the factory in 1923.⁶⁴ The inspector was an astute observer. The rationalisation efforts undertaken by the PPR and the Polish state after the liberation, though modelled on the Soviet example, bore an uncanny resemblance to the policies of the French factory management of the 1930s. Both the Soviet model of rationalisation and the French rationalisation in 1930s Żyrardów were, in fact, part of the same drive to introduce scientific methods of production and management – ideas referred to as Taylorism – that emerged in the 1900s in the USA and spread globally in the first few decades of the 20th century, including to the USSR.⁶⁵ As a result, many solutions used to increase productivity in Stalinist Russia and 1930s Żyrardów were similar. These included the individualization of wages through the employment of a piece-rate system with premiums granted after achieving a set norm, work across multiple machines, and deskilling in connection with the feminization of certain jobs. Even “labour races” (wyścigi pracy) – a form of labour gamification in which those workers who exceeded the production quota received prizes or financial rewards – which in Polish culture became almost synonymous with Stalinist managerial techniques were not a new concept to Żyrardów’s workers. Rather, they were first introduced in the late 1920s as part of capitalist rationalisation.⁶⁶ Admittedly, post-war policymakers were inspired by analogous Soviet solutions rather than methods of labour mobilisation found in pre-war Poland. Neverthe-

 Konar, “Strajk w Zakładach”, p. 93.  Labour Inspectorate Section to the Director of the Department of Labour, 10 April 1945, as cited in: Fidelis, Women, Communism (Cambridge, 2010), p. 71. The file is unavailable for an indeterminate period due to the transfer of archival material from the Archive of the Union Movement to the AAN.  The policies introduced in Żyrardów are well-described inter alia in the memoirs of Paweł Hulka-Laskowski. P. Hulka-Laskowski, Mój Żyrardów: z dziejów polskiego miasta i z życia pisarza (s.l., 1934), pp. 295 – 370.  Worth noting is the fact that rationalization was called amerykanizacja (Americanization) in interwar Poland. A. Danieluk, Racjonalizacja przemysłu a klasa robotnicza (Warszawa, 1928), pp. 35 – 37. The literature on the Taylorist inspiration behind Soviet industrial management is vast. See in particular: L. H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935 – 1941 (Cambridge, 1988); D. Kelly, The Red Taylorist: The Life and Times of Walter Nicholas Polakov (Bingley, 2020).  “Żyrardów – ‘piekło i przekleństwo’”, Dobry Wieczór! Kurier Czerwony (15 April 1932), p. 3.

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less, the term “labour race” itself – as opposed to “labour competition” (współzawodnictwo pracy) as the same concept was referred to in other Central European countries, as well as in Poland after 1947 – likely derived from a pre-war Polish source rather than a Soviet one. It might have been taken, albeit not necessarily in a direct manner, from an oft-cited passage from the future Sanacja leader Józef Piłsudski, from 1919: “the times that are coming will be marked by the labour race, just as before [they were marked by] the iron race, just as before [they were marked by] the blood race”.⁶⁷ The labour inspector’s strong words in April 1945 were prompted by attempts to re-introduce work across multiple machines. This was a particularly contentious issue, for this “murderous [style of] work”, as interwar labour activists referred to it, had been partially banned in Żyrardów in the late 1930s following a protracted legal battle led by the trade unions.⁶⁸ It was no wonder, then, that attempts to re-introduce these methods were met with radical opposition from communist activists who remembered its effects clearly. For example, a worker who led the weavers in their collective refusal to switch to work across multiple machines in September 1945 was a veteran Communist activist.⁶⁹ This activist, Stanisława M., was not punished by the party in any way. Tensions between the local party leadership and the factory director, the relative independence of the local party chapter from the higher authorities, and the rather universal rejection of work across multiple machines by local communists provided her with the necessary cover.

III Stalinisation: the closing caesura Three years later, Stanisława M. was accused of being a Nazi collaborator during the occupation.⁷⁰ The accusation was almost certainly fabricated and used as a

 As cited in: K Jakubiak, “Idee kultury pracy i wychowania zawodowego w II Rzeczypospolitej”, Szkoła – Zawód – Praca, 5/6 (2013), p. 12. The quote was well known in pre-war Żyrardów. In 1934, factory handweavers produced a banner with Piłsudski’s likeness and those exact words. The piece is currently on display in the Museum of Western Masovia in Żyrardów. I don’t have any direct evidence suggesting that the post-war authorities consciously used the quotation, but considering the fact that they used the same narrative (an armed struggle for the country equated with the struggle in the workplace), and how common it was to find former Sanacja officials in the post-war economic administration, it seems plausible.  “Ograniczenie pracy morderczej”, Gazeta Robotnicza, (22 Jan. 1939), p. 3.  Minutes from the Party town meeting, 11 June 1945, APW, OM, KM PPR, File 2.  Minutes from the meeting of the Factory Committee, 27.11.1948, APW, OM, KM PPR, File 16.

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method of removing a defiant activist: the aforementioned episode was not the only time she had taken bold action against factory management.⁷¹ Stanisława M.’s case might be regarded as indicative of much larger changes in the party, both at the local as well as the national level. A few months earlier, in September 1948, Gomułka had been deposed from the position of first secretary and many of his alleged allies expelled from the party. Further, after the absorption of the PPS in December 1948, the communist party tightened its power over state institutions, as well as centralizing and developing stronger mechanisms of internal party control, even directing a special secret police department to conduct party surveillance. In the historical literature, the last two years of the 1940s are commonly seen as the caesura ending the early post-war period and initiating the Stalinist era, which would last until the political changes of 1956. I do not dispute the validity of this periodization. Rather, it is my argument that we may consider the caesura of the late 1940s not only as the beginning of Stalinism, but as the conclusion of a much longer transwar period. Even so, at the factory level, transwar continuities would take longer to snuff out, as the political and economic developments entailed by Stalinisation were more spread out over time. The processes which began or became central around 1948 or 1949 would only reach their completion in Żyrardów in the years 1951– 1952. After 1948, the relative independence of Żyrardów’s party organization was increasingly suppressed. In 1949, the workers’ courts were abolished and their creator, the former first secretary of Żyrardów’s PPR, was prosecuted for their establishment.⁷² The whole local party leadership was slowly replaced with activists who lacked ties to Żyrardów and often had no experience in the pre-war communist movement.⁷³ Żyrardów was not an exception here. In the elections of February 1950, half of all high-ranking local functionaries – in particular veterans of the communist movement – were replaced nationwide.⁷⁴ The process was completed in Żyrardów when in January 1952, following a series of strikes in the town’s main factory during the summer of 1951, the whole local party lead-

 For example, she accused factory management of starving the workers in May 1946. Minutes from the industrial conference in Żyrardów, 24 May 1946, APW, OM, KM PPR, File 15.  M Rajner, Organizowanie władzy ludowej w woj. warszawskim, AAN, ZAODDR, File 4893.  Thanks to the special commission of party control that functioned in Żyrardów in 1950 – 1951, we have a detailed description of intra-party relations and the biographical background of party leaders for this period. Sprawozdanie specjalnej komisji WKW PZPR o panujących stosunkach w Komitecie Miejskim w Żyrardowskiej Organizacji Partyjnej, APW, OM, Voivodship Committee of the PZPR in Warsaw (WKW PZPR), File 352.  B. Dymek, “Pracownicy etatowi PZPR 1948 – 1954”, Z Pola Walki, 26/3 – 4 (1983), p. 76.

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ership was replaced. Zofia Patorowa, a former textile worker from Łódź with no ties to the pre-war communist movement and, not coincidentally, a member of the party’s main disciplining body,⁷⁵ became Żyrardów’s party secretary.⁷⁶ The personal continuity with the KPP within party structures was largely destroyed. Even after the old Communists came back to the town in October 1956 following the Thaw and Gomułka’s return to power, the control over party structures remained in the hands of the younger generation, who were often professionals educated in the post-war university system rather than working-class activists. The late 1940s brought significant change to power structures at the factory level, too. In a speech to industrial managers in 1946, Hilary Minc contended that a year earlier the “position of the engineer or the director” had seemed to face “an existential threat” and that the old cadres had been rejected by the workers. Fortunately, however, according to Minc, those days were over. Pre-war hierarchies were reaffirmed and the influence of factory committees on management was lifted.⁷⁷ As it soon turned out, Minc was not entirely honest in his speech. The restoration of pre-war hierarchies was merely a step towards the full centralisation of the economy. From late 1947, managerial positions were gradually weakened, this time by the state. With the development of a strong, centralized industrial administration, mid- and high-level managers in the factories were turned into bureaucrats with less decision-making power.⁷⁸ Thus, the skill and experience of the pre-war industrial management at the factory level seemingly became less indispensable to the proper functioning of the economy; pre-war managers, engineers, and foremen were gradually replaced by freshly promoted – often young – workers. Furthermore, authority in the factory was now built, to a much larger degree, on the ability to forge unofficial alliances both within the factory and with the higher state and party authorities, and much less on the official intra-factory hierarchy.⁷⁹ Pre-war shop-floor hierarchies were finally abol-

 The Central Committee of Party Control.  Biuletyn Informacji Publicznej Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej, https://katalog.bip.ipn.gov.pl/ informacje/42439 (accessed 2 May 2021).  H. Minc, “Przemówienie Ministra Przemysłu Hilarego Minca na drugim Zjeździe Przemysłowym Ziem Odzyskanych we Wrocławiu”, in H. Minc et al., Nasza gospodarka na Ziemiach Odzyskanych: [przemówienia] (na drugim Zjeździe Przemysłowym Ziem Odzyskanych we Wrocławiu) (Warszawa, 1946), pp. 41– 43.  M. Tymiński, Partyjni agenci: analiza instytucjonalna działalności lokalnych instancji PZPR w przemyśle (1949 – 1955) (Warszawa, 2011), pp. 147– 149.  Tymiński, Partyjni agenci, pp. 245 – 250. For parallel developments in Czechoslovakia see P. Heumos, “Zur Frage Informeller Machtverhältnisse Im Staatssozialismus. Das Beispiel Der Tschechoslowakischen Industriebetriebe 1945 – 1968”, Acta Oeconomica Pragensia, 7 (2007), pp. 161– 75.

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ished, but in a manner that differed from how Żyrardów’s communists had envisaged this during the interwar and immediate post-war periods. After 1948, the industrial authorities generally became less insistent on introducing Taylorist solutions, in what signalled a tentative break with the prewar model of work organization. The focus on speed and individual performance was replaced by greater attention to collective cooperation and precision. In some sections of the factory, such as the sewing shops, assembly lines were created. While the piece-rate was upheld, the new system deprived workers of individual control over their pace of work and, hence, effectively abolished individualized wages.⁸⁰ In the sections where mounting conveyor belts was impossible, workers saw a rapid rise of work norms that made receiving premiums increasingly difficult and, thus, equalized their earnings as well. Furthermore, workers would now usually take part in the “labour competition” not as individuals but as members of work crews. The points used to determine the allocation of prizes were, in turn, increasingly dependent not on exceeding production norms but on collective activities such as maintaining a tidy shop.⁸¹

IV Conclusions Presenting World War II as a caesura seems natural in the study of Polish history. As I have shown here, however, its absolutization is neither natural nor neutral. Accepting the periodization set by the war often means prioritizing political events and high politics over social and local histories, as well as reaffirming the dominant view of the communist post-war regime as entirely new and alien to Polish society. While the events of the war were without a doubt catastrophic, they did not constitute a total break with the past nor were they understood as such by the historical actors who are the focus of this chapter. By devising a periodization based on the experiences of Żyrardów workers and on their understandings of history, I was able to uncover continuities obscured by the naturalisation of the war as a caesura. In Żyrardów, the communist movement was deeply rooted in the working-class community and the war did not break its ideological and personal continuity. There also existed continuities in the forms of labour organization and workplace hierarchies in the town’s main factory.

 Report on the condition of Zakłady Żyrardowskie in August 1948, APW, OM, KM PPR, File 8.  H. Wilk, Kto wyrąbie więcej ode mnie?: Współzawodnictwo pracy robotników w Polsce w latach 1947 – 1955 (Warszawa, 2011), p. 303.

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From the micro-historical viewpoint, what has often been described as an imposition of a foreign power may be conceived as a reinvigoration, albeit in different political circumstances, of pre-war struggles. In the immediate post-war period, the native communists opposed the re-introduction of anti-collectivist Taylorist solutions, contested pre-war shop-floor hierarchies, and strove to maintain and expand forms of workers’ self-management. The economic administration, in turn, attempted to reinforce the power of pre-war management and implemented policies almost indistinguishable from those applied before 1939. Following this, rather than in 1945, the more significant break with the past came in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when continuities within the local communist movement and shop-floor hierarchies in the factory were broken and the Taylorization drive was largely abandoned. As was stated earlier, Żyrardów cannot be treated as a representative example of Polish industrial towns in the 20th century. Nonetheless, the analysis of its particularity reveals continuities that go beyond the local context. The endurance of pre-war ideas amongst local communist activists and these ideas’ influence in shaping the early post-war regime certainly needs to be studied further and in different environments. However, the most promising observation comes from the shop floor. This has revealed not only transwar continuities within power structures and shop-floor hierarchies, but also parallels between the Taylorist methods of management introduced in the 1920s and those introduced after 1945 – parallels that demand further study. This is a question that has been entirely absent in the historiography of Polish labour and that it was only possible to uncover thanks to the micro-historical character of the present study.

Lucian George

Chapter 2 Rumours of Re-Enserfment, Anti-Feudal Identities and “Folk Periodization”: The Memory of Serfdom in Early 20th-Century Galicia This chapter deals with the afterlives of serfdom in the Polish lands during the early 20th century. Its principal focus is on interwar Galicia, the region of Poland that from 1772 until 1918 was under Habsburg rule. The legal norms that constituted serfdom were abolished in Austria in a drawn-out process lasting from the Josephine reforms of the 1770s–1780s to the end of the 19th century.¹ In peasant memory, it was mainly the year of 1848, in which corvée labour was abolished, that stood out as the end of serfdom. Long after 1848, however, the memory of serfdom continued to permeate the mental world of Galician peasants. Though they recognised that serfdom had ended, peasants remained convinced that its consignment to history was far from complete. Serfdom’s effects remained visible, and the possibility of its return struck many as real. Whether out of inertia or because of their perceived relevance to the post-1848 present, narratives of feudal suffering and anti-feudal resistance also retained their centrality to rural identities.² What is more, this persistence was not always at odds with contem-

Note: I wish to thank Dr Katherine Lebow, George Andrei, Chiara Ardoino and the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments and criticisms on earlier drafts of this chapter.  It was in the second half of the 19th century that most conflicts over peasants’ customary rights of usufruct to dominical (i.e. estate-owned) forests and pastures were judicially resolved, usually to the peasants’ disadvantage. For more on the Josephine reforms in Galicia, see E. Niederhauser, The Emancipation of the Serfs in Eastern Europe, trans. P. Bődy (Boulder CO, 2004), pp. 98 – 99.  Whilst the category of “feudalism” has been hotly contested amongst historians, my own usage of “feudal”/“anti-feudal” does not reflect any deeper theoretical commitment to one or another definition or to the category’s broader historical validity. As the English noun “serfdom” lacks a commonly used adjectival form, I have reluctantly accepted “feudal” as a stand-in for the Polish pańszczyźniany (“relating to serfdom”) when referring to the socioeconomic system, also known as Gutsherrschaft, that existed prior to the emancipation of the serfs. By contrast, when referring to or citing emic usages of pańszczyźniany in historical sources, I have chosen to translate the same adjective as “seigneurial”. Here, my primary motive was to avoid any implication https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636000-003

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porary modernisation processes. Even as they changed how peasants saw the world and diminished fears of re-enserfment, modernisation processes frequently intensified the salience of feudal memory traditions. Far from withering, these now became the basis for modern political identities, claims and antagonisms. As a result, for many decades after emancipation, peasants would perceive their present world and its relationship to the past through a lens that denied it many of the attributes commonly thought to have made it modern and, thus, irrevocably different from earlier periods – a lens that differed fundamentally from that of most social elites. This chapter seeks to illuminate the structures and processes behind this peasant temporality and the “folk periodization” – or, rather, non-periodization – it implied. In the first section, I use the case study of an interwar peasant revolt sparked by rumours of re-enserfment to highlight socioeconomic continuities between the pre- and post-emancipation periods – continuities which gave the peasant temporality its experiential basis. In the second section, I turn to the cultural mechanisms through which the memory of serfdom was transmitted and integrated into rural identities, priming peasants who had no personal experience of serfdom to discern the legacies of the past in the present. Sections IIIV, in turn, address how the memory of serfdom interacted with, and was variously reinforced by, aspects of political modernisation, in particular the emergence of mass politics (section III), the rise of peasant nationalism (IV), and the spread and radicalisation of the Polish peasant movement (V).

I Fears of re-enserfment and experiences of continuity in the post-1848 countryside That periodization is political is something of a truism. Not all aspects of its political nature, however, have been equally explored. It is, for example, infrequently observed how period boundaries can serve to disguise the uncomfortable continuities which those in power might prefer to ignore. Even less frequently remarked is how this political dimension of period boundaries might be used to yield historical knowledge. To uncover continuities – be they

that historical actors conceived of serfdom as a historical stage or system akin to feudalism. Furthermore, owing to their self-evident etymological derivation from the French/Polish word for “lord” (seigneur/pan), it is likely “seigneurial” better conveys the specific connotations of pańszczyźniany as it was used in political and social discourse than the more abstract-sounding “feudal”.

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emic or etic – that exist across period boundaries, there is potentially much to be gained by attending to instances where the periodization schemes of dominant and subaltern social groups have been in conflict. One might object that most social groups simply do not possess periodization schemes tout court. Whilst this might be true of explicit periodization, implicit periodization is likely a universal part of human thinking, traces of which can be identified in the most mundane actions of everyday life. When acting in the world, all people work with certain assumptions and expectations about how the present world is structured and, more implicitly, how it differs from the past and the future, whether real or imagined.³ These assumptions about how the past relates to the present/ future are usually hard to perceive but can manifest themselves precisely at those moments where one group’s assumptions clash with those of another. In this section of the chapter, I will be talking about one such case – a clash between the opposing periodizations (or temporalities, to use a more conventional term) of educated Polish society, on the one hand, and much of the Galician peasantry, on the other. One of the key divergences between these temporalities concerned how each group perceived the age of serfdom in relation to the historical present. For more than half a century after the 1848 emancipation, the Galician countryside would be shaken by recurring episodes of unrest, driven by peasant fears that serfdom was about to be reinstated. This was happening at the very same time that elites in East-Central Europe squared up to the challenge of modernisation, alternately drawing hope from its imminence, despairing at its absence and reacting against the new historical period they feared they were entering.⁴ By contrast, what inspired uncertainty amongst peasants was not the na-

 This is what Reinhart Koselleck referred to as the confluence between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation”. In Koselleck’s view, the way expectations related to experience underwent a radical change between 1750 and 1850 – the so-called Sattelzeit period when a mounting social awareness of accelerated historical change served to disqualify the past as a guide to understandings of the present and future. If Koselleck’s thesis is accepted, the post-1848 peasant perspective on serfdom might simply appear as a legacy of anachronism-prone, premodern patterns of thinking. Against such a view, this section will show how the peasants’ seemingly “ahistorical” perspective was in part fuelled by genuine continuities, noticed not just by the peasants but also those of a clearly modernist sensibility. Whilst subsequent sections will consider the more schematic (and therefore anachronistic) aspects of the peasant memory tradition, here too the emphasis will be on how this anachronism was reinforced by modern political processes rather than on its possible reflection of pre-modern thought patterns. R. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. T.S. Presner et al. (Stanford, 2002), pp. 111– 114 and passim.  J. Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization (Budapest, 1999); S. Antohi and B. Trencsényi, “Introduction: Approaching Anti-Modernism”,

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ture of this unknown future, but the prospect of an all-too-familiar past overturning their post-emancipation gains.⁵ This fear of a resurgent past was quite unlike the longing for the past articulated in many other peasant protests in which an earlier customary age has been held up as an alternative to present-day injustice.⁶ Similar instances in which emancipated subalterns feared feudal counterrevolution have long been familiar to historians elsewhere in the world. Undoubtedly the best-known example is that of La Grande Peur which swept the French countryside in the summer of 1789.⁷ More recently, historians of the Americas have analysed the rumours of re-enslavement and thwarted emancipation that appeared periodically throughout the 19th century.⁸ By contrast, only passing attention has been devoted in the historiography of East-Central Europe to the way serfdom persisted in peasant fears and memory.⁹ Nor have the re-enserfment panics in post-emancipation Poland ever sustained much historical interest. Instead, they have been treated as irrelevant curiosities, neuroses or survivals, the stuff of travel guides and amateur local histories, deserving either the odd fleeting mention or, in the case of larger incidents, qualified annexation to the larger history of popular unrest.¹⁰ In part, this neglect reflects the panics’ awkwardness as a historical datum, their very existence jarring with the dominant emphasis –

in D. Mishkova, M. Turda and B. Trencsényi (eds), Anti-Modernism: Radical Revisions of Collective Identity (Budapest, 2014), pp. 1– 44.  At the same time, there was a certain symmetry between these peasant fears and the belief held by various intellectuals according to which East-Central European modernity was more formal than substantive (see Introduction, p. 11).  For more on the role of custom in rural and popular protest, see E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century”, Past & Present, 50/1 (1971), pp. 76 – 136; J.C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven CT, 1976).  G. Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, trans. J. White (London, 1973).  A. Eller, “Rumors of Slavery: Defending Emancipation in a Hostile Caribbean”, American Historical Review 122/3 (2017), pp. 653 – 679; W. Klooster, “Slave Revolts, Royal Justice, and a Ubiquitous Rumor in the Age of Revolutions”, William and Mary Quarterly, 71/3 (2014), pp. 401– 424.  Recently, however, there has been some thoughtful work on how serfdom was depicted in literary and artistic representations. See P. Tomczok, “Pańszczyzna i przemoc. Historie literackie i wspomnieniowe”, Praktyka Teoretyczna, 23/1 (2017), pp. 237– 266; A. Brickell Bellows, American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination (Chapel Hill NC, 2020).  J. Borkowski, Postawa polityczna chłopów polskich w latach 1930 – 35 (Warsaw, 1970), pp. 73 – 80; P. Cichoracki, J. Dufrat and J. Mierzwa, Oblicza buntu społecznego w II Rzeczypospolitej doby Wielkiego Kryzysu (1930 – 1935): uwarunkowania, skala, konsekwencje (Kraków, 2019), pp. 164– 171.

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both within historiography and amongst social elites at the time – on various processes of modernisation and nation-building. Nevertheless, multiple panics in quite dispersed localities suggest that, for a long time, the fear of re-enserfment remained an important part of peasants’ everyday emotions. In 1883 festivities for the 200th anniversary of the battle of Vienna in the district (powiat) town of Nowy Sącz failed to draw the expected crowds, after rumours that this was nothing but a conspiracy to make the peasants “sign up for servitude” convinced most villagers to keep their distance. In 1886, in Tarnów district, peasants armed themselves after rumours that the patriotic Polish gentry was preparing an anti-Austrian uprising with an ultimate view to re-enserfment.¹¹ In Sanok district in 1920 – two years after Polish independence – suspicions were once again raised when a district governor (starosta) instructed a village mayor (wójt) to deliver to his office some blank forms, pre-signed and impressed with the communal stamp. Inferring that the local landowner had bribed the mayor to sell them out (in the most literal sense), local peasants prevented the forms from being delivered, arresting and assaulting the messenger charged with their collection.¹² This is only a small selection out of a myriad of similarly eccentric incidents. Of these, by far the most dramatic, longest-lasting and most talked-about was also the last to occur on record: the two-week Lesko “uprising” (povstannya; powstanie) – as Ukrainian and Polish communists immediately christened it¹³ – of 1932. It is this episode that will be the focus of the present section.¹⁴After recounting how it unfolded, I will discuss the bafflement with which the “bourgeois” public sphere responded to the unrest. In the eyes of the educated public, it seemed surreal that so many of their contemporaries could not discern the historical gulf between modernity and the age of serfdom, a gulf that rendered the threat of re-enserfment entirely irrelevant. However, as will be argued, this perception of anachronism was only partially warranted. Almost a century after emancipation there were still many aspects of peasants’ daily lives in Lesko district (and beyond) that, taken alone, either lent credibility to rumours of re-en-

 M. Łuczewski, Odwieczny naród: Polak i katolik w Żmiącej (Toruń, 2012), p. 226.  Described in Dilo (26 July 1932), p. 3.  J. Borkowski, “Powstanie leskie w świetle sprawozdania Urzędu Województwa Lwowskiego”, Roczniki Dziejów Ruchu Ludowego, 79 (1967), pp. 413 – 414.  For a more extensive discussion of the Lesko revolt see the dissertation on which this section is based: L. George, “A Comparative Study of Two Peasant Revolts in 1930s Poland” (MA diss., Central European University, 2016).

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serfment or, at the very least, persuaded peasants that the memory of serfdom remained relevant to the present. *** Before moving further, let us try to imagine the scene in Lesko district, a remote, rural and mountainous corner in the principally Ukrainian-speaking part of Galicia. In June 1932, a decision was taken to coordinate a “Feast Day of Labour” (Święto Pracy) in the district: to this end, two civic meetings were held on 19 June to communicate the initiative to the wider population and elect an organising committee.¹⁵ Conceived by a local landowner, Count Jan Nepomucen Potocki, and endorsed by the district governor the previous year, the “Feast Day” was envisaged as a day of unremunerated public works during which, as one villager subsequently put it, “peasants would build a road for free”.¹⁶ In reality, there was nothing extraordinary about such mandatory labour dues when imposed for communal purposes – the practice was enshrined in the laws of Polish local government and typically went under the name szarwark. ¹⁷ The “Feast Day of Labour”, however, did not have a customary sound to the peasant ear. On the contrary, it looked like the most sinister of oxymorons, collapsing the divide between the two poles of peasant existence – the drudgery of everyday life and the cherished idleness of the religious feast – in one sacralised act of profanation.¹⁸ This sinister unfamiliarity ensured fertile ground for fears that the “lords” (pany/ panowie)¹⁹ were up to something evil.

 Borkowski, “Powstanie”, p. 384.  Warsaw, Archiwum Zakładu Historii Ruchu Ludowego [AZHRL], WSC, R8, Interview with W. Gąsiowski (Secretary of the PZPR Town Committee of Lesko), 19 April 1952.  The association of the szarwark with the threat of re-enserfment was not entirely unprecedented. In the 1880s a similar panic had occurred in the village of Grodzisko Górne after the imposition of a szarwark. Nevertheless, the perception of the szarwark’s illegitimacy was far from universal or permanent. It has, for instance, recently been argued that communist agitation against the szarwark enjoyed only limited success in Belarussian regions of Poland during the 1930s, precisely because it was not perceived as an illegitimate imposition. J. Burszta, Wieś małopolska: studium struktury i organizacji społeczno-przestrzennej wsi Grodzisko w powiecie łańcuckim, ed. W.J. Burszta (Poznań, 1997), p. 164; Cichoracki et al., Oblicza buntu, pp. 152– 153.  33 years after the unrest, one villager claimed that peasants would actually have agreed to take part in the road construction, had it not been for the name. Nevertheless, in surrounding districts, similar “Feast Days” had passed without controversy between 1930 and 1932. Borkowski, “Powstanie”, pp. 376, 409.  The customary word used by peasants to refer to landowners and all other perceived social elites.

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Rumour rapidly supplied evidence for the fears that had been awakened.²⁰ The very next day, a village mayor contacted the district governor to inform him of rumours claiming that the “lords” had paid the mayor $100 to rubberstamp the initiative.²¹ Twenty years later, an unrest participant recounted how “grandma” (babka) Tomaszewska of Zabrodzie had alerted her neighbours to a meeting held on the manorial fields by the very “lords” who had announced the “Feast Day”: after their conference, they had gathered at the forest edge where they talked and pointed at the courthouse.²² Though their conversation was inaudible, the choice of location gave them away. According to local lore the field on which they stood was the very site where the symbolic ornaments of serfdom, including the legal documents that formerly bound the peasants to their lords, had been buried after 1848. The landowners had clearly decided to dig them up; the “Feast Day” was but the opening salvo in the peasants’ re-enserfment. As tongues flapped, the plot thickened. Some claimed that the de facto leader of Poland, Józef Piłsudski, had been murdered by the “counts” (hrabowie), after daring to thwart their attempts to implement a re-enserfment law which had successfully passed through the Senate.²³ In another version of this rumour, Piłsudski was said to have challenged the “Feast Day” organiser, Count Potocki, to a bet of $100,000, predicting that the count’s plans of re-enserfment would fail without the help of the army whose deployment Piłsudski would not authorise.²⁴ The rumours travelled as quickly as they mutated: on 20 – 21 June news of the re-enserfment was concentrated within a several km radius of the town of Ustrzyki Dolne in the north of Lesko district; by the end of the month it had worked its way up to the highest valleys of the Bieszczady mountains 35 km to the south (as the crow flies, across hilly terrain and in an area with extremely limited communications); and by the beginning of July the Czechoslovak border had been closed, likely due to rumours that the Ukrainian nationalist group

 The rumours that follow have been assembled from a variety of sources, including the voivodeship authorities’ official report on the Lesko unrest and participant recollections recorded in 1952. It is not known which rumours developed first and whether the rumours reported in 1952 were in circulation in 1932. For the official report see Borkowski, “Powstanie”, pp. 377– 409.  Idem, p. 384.  This recollection deviates in many of its details from the official report and is unlikely to be an accurate reproduction of rumours at the time. Nevertheless, it offers a useful glimpse into what stood out in peasant memory as cause for suspicion. AZHRL, WSC, R8, Interview with Gąsiowski.  AZHRL, WSC, R19, Interview with J. Konik (ZSL member and sołtys [village leader] of Łobozew), 20 April 1952.  Borkowski, “Powstanie”, p. 407.

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Sokil was organising reinforcements on the other side.²⁵ The spread of rumours was not fortuitous but resulted from a deliberate effort by rural communities to mobilise as many people as possible against the “lords’” conspiracy. Messengers travelled from village to village, on horseback, on foot and by bicycle, summoning peasants to converge on the village where the cross commemorating the serfs’ emancipation risked being dug up.²⁶ Already abuzz with panicked gossip, the hills were now flooded with an even more disconcerting din – the untimely ringing of church bells, a sure sign to all that the countryside was in a state of emergency.²⁷ After a day of excesses on 30 June during which a police patrol was disarmed, an estate leaseholder beaten and subject to a mock trial, and a landowner’s house ransacked and its owner beaten unconscious, the voivodeship and district authorities rallied their forces. Following a day of skirmishes between peasants and the police on 1 July, order was gradually restored. In the end a total of 469 policemen (including 53 local functionaries) and six reconnaissance aircrafts had to be deployed to suppress the unrest, which, in turn, had involved several thousand peasants from at least twenty villages.²⁸ In the eyes of the regional bureaucracy and the moderate press, the Lesko rebellion was an occurrence of surreal absurdity. It beggared belief that citizens of modern Poland could have fallen for rumours whose rightful place was in another epoch. Only amongst “the uncritical part of the peasantry”²⁹, “only in places that have not yet been reached by light,”³⁰ thundered the pro-governmental Gazeta Lwowska, could people have been so “befuddled”³¹ by agitators – for the perniciousness of the rumours left no doubt as to the communist spectre behind them. Here was proof, according to the right-leaning Polish peasant newspaper Piast, of what would happen if the government continued its repression of the peasant movement, thereby thwarting its civilising effects on Poland’s Ruthenian (i. e., Ukrainian) minority: before the May Coup (1926) it would have been unimaginable for whole villages to succumb to “such anti-Polish delusions”.³² Though it expressed itself with more sympathy and less condescension, the moderate na-

       

Idem, pp. 396, 400. Idem, p. 387. Idem, p. 388. Cichoracki et al., Oblicza buntu, p. 167. Gazeta Lwowska (3 July 1932), p. 4. Gazeta Lwowska (5 July 1932), p. 1. Gazeta Lwowska (3 July 1932), p. 1. Piast (17 July 1932), p. 3.

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tionalist Ukrainian press broadly echoed the diagnosis of backwardness.³³ Nowhere was the civilisational gulf made more brutally clear than in the Ministry of Interior-approved leaflets that were scattered over Lesko district by military planes. “Those who believe in the return of serfdom in the Polish State,” the leaflets warned the peasants, “render themselves ridiculous in the eyes of thinking people.”³⁴ Admittedly, this condescending reaction did have some justification. The Lesko district was a mountain hinterland characterised by minimal political engagement and a rural illiteracy rate of 58.6 % amongst those over 10 (compared to 27.9 % of the rural population over 10 in Lwów voivodeship as a whole).³⁵ In both regards it clearly differed from much of rural Galicia where newspaper readership, reading clubs, credit societies, farming cooperatives and sundry other forms of rural civil society had proliferated since the last decades of the 19th century amongst both Polish and Ukrainian peasants. It is probably true that rumours of re-enserfment could never have gained so much ground in parts of the province with a peasantry that was more educated and conversant in modern politics. The anachronism of the rumours appears even more striking if we consider that the Lesko events were part of a global wave of agrarian unrest emerging in connection to the Great Depression and stretching from El Salvador to Indochina.³⁶ Though the Galician peasant economy significantly differed from the increasingly cash crop-dominated agriculture of El Salvador and Indochina, in all three cases agrarian discontent was exacerbated by the pressures placed on the peasantry by the global economic crisis. In Galicia these pressures included the notorious price scissors between agricultural and industrial commodities, falling wages, the loss of migration opportunities and remittances, unemployment, and mounting tax and debt arrears – problems which the peasants’ growing market-dependency and subsumption by a capitalist economy had made them all the more vulnerable to. Viewed in this context, the battle-cry of the

 Such treatment of the Lesko events by moderate nationalists would, in turn, court the condemnation of the more radical Ukrainian nationalist press, which was keen to deny the events’ irrationality by casting them as a nationally conscious anti-Polish rebellion. Ukrainskiy Golos, cited in Dilo (7 Aug. 1932), p. 1.  Borkowski, “Powstanie”, pp. 400 – 403.  These figures are limited to those who could neither read nor write. Drugi powszechny spis ludności z dn. 9.XII.1931 r: Mieszkania i gospodarstwa domowe. Ludność. Stosunki zawodowe: Województwo lwowskie bez miasta Lwowa (Warsaw, 1938), pp. 82– 83.  For the revolts in Indochina, see Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant; for events in El Salvador, see T.P. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador’s Communist Revolt of 1932 (Lincoln NE, 1971).

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Lesko rebels truly seems like a bad historical hangover: an anti-feudal revolt at a time when capitalist crisis was chiselling away at peasant subsistence. What such a picture leaves out, however, is the extent to which the postemancipation rural economy in Galicia recreated aspects of feudal property and social relations. As is well known, the emancipation of the serfs in East-Central Europe was conducted in a way that preserved the economic interests of the landowning nobility.³⁷ In Galicia peasants not only failed to gain new land in 1848 but also – in what was often a conflictual process – had their right of usufruct to the lords’ forests and grazing grounds (serwituty) taken away during subsequent decades, thus depriving them of access to essential resources. Combined with rapid demographic growth and the resulting fragmentation of peasant smallholdings, this in time prevented much of the Galician peasantry from becoming self-sufficient. In parts of the province, smallholders became increasingly dependent on the seasonal labour opportunities offered by the estates, especially in moments of economic crisis when work was scarce elsewhere. Traditional feudal ties were thus repackaged as exchange transactions in which peasants worked for the estates on highly unfavourable conditions in order to gain vital resources. Where credit unions failed to take root (as in Lesko district), debt peonage could easily become endemic.³⁸ The limitations that smallholdings imposed on peasant mobility also perpetuated a watereddown version of feudal bondage. Peasants might have been able to migrate for work, but it was not realistic for them to obtain firewood and other resources from anyone other than their closest estate. As a result, the basic proletarian freedom to choose one’s exploiter on the market remained partially limited. This gave a new lease of life to feudal forms of interpersonal authority that might have perished sooner in an impersonal market. Admittedly, the scale and depth of such similarities should not be exaggerated. The economic contact between peasants and the estates was only a shadow of what it had been at the time of the corvée. Migration opportunities that appeared at the end of the 19th century diminished the economic dependency of the excess rural population on the landowners. After 1900 the economic contact between peasants and estates was further reduced, as estates sold off vast tracts of ploughland to the peasants, thereby changing the rural property structure to

 Niederhauser, Emancipation.  Indeed, most villagers in Bóbrka where the landowner beaten during the Lesko unrest had his manor were indebted to the landowner “for wood, leaves from the forest, potatoes, grain, straw, pasturage” (AZHRL, WSC, R8, Interview with Michał Kusz). In the whole of Lesko district there were only seven credit unions by the late 1930s – a very low number by Galician standards. J. Kuczyński, Monografia handlu zbożem w powiecie leskim (Warsaw, 1937), p. 42.

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the latter’s favour.³⁹ Another crucial difference resided in the structural mechanisms underpinning apparent continuities in estate-peasant relations. Most importantly, those who laboured within the post-1848 estate economy typically did so out of economic compulsion rather than direct coercion – mechanisms of labour extraction that peasants could hardly have confused. Indeed, peasants were able to recognise the qualitative difference between them, hence why those in Lesko district distinguished between interwar labour conditions and a putative serfdom-to-come. Nevertheless, surface-level continuities within the post1848 landowner-peasant relationship were strong enough to warrant the suspicion that the capitalist “invisible hand” might have concealed a renascent feudal fist. After all, just as Galician feudalism had possessed little in the way of paternalistic reciprocity, so post-emancipation agrarian capitalism frequently proved deficient in contractual elements.⁴⁰ In Lesko district it was reportedly common in the interwar period for estates to adopt an attitude of calculated and arbitrary harshness, such as to squeeze as much free labour out of the peasantry as possible. The feelings of injustice such behaviour evoked were strong enough to endure in rural memory for decades. In one village it was still remembered in the 2000s how livestock that trespassed onto estate land would be confiscated and held hostage until three days of punitive labour had been performed.⁴¹ In another village peasants were allowed to graze their cattle in the estate forest in return for 60 days’ worth of free labour, but “if the cow died from the lousy forest grass”, the peasant would still have to live up to his side of the deal.⁴² Crucially, many of these stratagems were nothing new, having been employed by landowners prior to the abolition of serfdom and even attracted the censure of the Austrian authorities.⁴³ Such economic coercion was accompanied by more gratuitous forms of bullying that mainly served to perpetuate the peasants’ socio-psychological subjection. By way of example, Jakubowski – the landowner who received a beating

 M. Mieszczankowski, Rolnictwo II Rzeczypospolitej (Warsaw, 1983), p. 23.  For more on the exploitative nature of late Galician feudalism, even after the Josephine reforms, see R. Rozdolski, Stosunki poddańcze w dawnej Galicji (2 vols, Warsaw, 1962), vol. I, pp. 256 – 263.  Fr. B. Janik and S. Orłowski (eds), Myczkowce nad Sanem w Bieszczadach (Rzeszów, 2009), p. 36.  AZHRL, WSC, R8, Interview with A. Dobrowolski from Uherce (member of the Olszanica PZPR Communal Committee), 21 April 1952.  The punitive confiscation of peasant livestock and demands that peasants deliver the lord’s mail (discussed in the following paragraph) were both expressly condemned as seigneurial abuses in an 1802 ordinance of the Galician governorate (Gubernium). Rozdolski, Stosunki, I, p. 258.

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during the Lesko unrest – relied on peasants to run his errands, backing up the expectation of deference with the threat of violence. In the 1950s Michał Kusz, one of the 1932 rebels, recounted the persecution to which he had been subject after refusing to carry Jakubowski’s mail into town when the landowner berated Kusz for striking his over-exuberant dog. In response to this insubordination, Jakubowski instructed the police to drag Kusz to his manor and threaten him with a beating and imprisonment. When this failed, he personally shot one of Kusz’s chickens, his bullet narrowly missing a child. When this also failed, he simply refused to pay Kusz his overdue wages. Ultimately, Jakubowski prevented Kusz from finding work on any of the local estates, thus forcing him to emigrate.⁴⁴ As the story shows, direct coercion and economic compulsion were not necessarily far apart in the estate-peasant relationship. Of course, coercion was no longer the main dynamo of the estate economy, but it was nevertheless sufficiently present and frustrating for the memory of serfdom to retain its experiential relevance.⁴⁵ That the parallels with serfdom appeared obvious to many contemporaries is confirmed by the ease with which it was invoked when trying to convey the nature of contemporary rural ills in the interwar press. The only difference between the “old and new serfdom”, one Left peasantist newspaper lamented, was that the power of exploiters came not from the “estate administrator’s whip, but from poverty”.⁴⁶ Headlines such as “Just like in the days of serfdom” were a standard garnish for stories about landowners’ and estate officials’ abuses of power in the Socialist newspaper for estate labourers.⁴⁷ Even the pro-government press sometimes employed such language to denounce poor work conditions and low pay on landed estates.⁴⁸ Elite perplexity in the face of re-enserfment rumours might then have concealed a sense of unease at the peasants’ refusal to treat such analogies as nothing more than a figure of speech.⁴⁹ We get a tantalising

 AZHRL, WSC, R8, Interview with Kusz.  Casual post-feudal violence also contributed to the generalised climate of fear that, according to peasant leader Wincenty Witos, dominated the everyday lives of the post-emancipation peasantry – a climate in which rumours of impending war, famine, bad air and, of course, re-enserfment could all the more readily gain ground. W. Witos, Moje wspomnienia (Warsaw, 1981), pp. 33 – 34, 56 – 57.  “Pańszczyzna stara i nowa”, Wyzwolenie (9 July 1933).  E. g., “Pańszczyzna na kresach”, Chłopska Prawda (19 April 1925), p. 4; “Jak za czasów pańszczyzny”, Chłopska Prawda (12 Sept. 1926), p. 8.  Wiek Nowy (12 July 1936), p. 10.  Nor were such analogies always meant to be read as just that. Though they did not believe in the threat of re-enserfment, in the 1930s peasantist intellectuals would develop a decidedly modernist version of the refeudalisation narrative, arguing that Poland’s civilisational back-

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hint of this in the field notes left behind by the interwar sociologist Józef Obrębski from his work in the Polesie region. “The subject of serfdom [constitutes] a taboo,” he wrote. “At the same time the notion of modern serfdom [is] universal. In conversations [one often hears the expression]: ‘it’s serfdom, worse than serfdom’, accompanied by embarrassment and coyness when the subject is raised [for fear that its discussion might anger the authorities […]]. [Nor is the] notion of modern serfdom unknown to state officials.”⁵⁰

II Serfdom as flexible cultural schema and the traditions of its transmission The preceding section emphasised how the memory and fear of serfdom were reinforced by “objective” socioeconomic continuities. Memory, however, rarely persists entirely unchanged over time. Almost a century after the abolition of serfdom what exactly did peasants have in mind when they claimed to fear its return? How strong was the resemblance between the imagined past they feared and the past as it had actually been experienced? Sure enough, clues offered by the Lesko unrest provide a window into how understandings of serfdom could mutate under new circumstances. Especially suggestive in this regard is the sensitive account written in the rebellion’s aftermath by the Ukrainian Socialist Radical deputy Mykhailo Matchak. After touring Lesko district in the days after its pacification, Matchak reported that road repairs had previously constituted an income source for local peasants. Part of their anxiety over the “Feast Day of Labour”, therefore, stemmed from the way it violated an expectation that peasants ought to have been paid for this kind of work. This anxiety over the loss of one specific income stream – at a time of acute Depression-induced unemployment and wage cuts, no less – transformed into a generalised panic about the abolition of paid labour. In one village

wardness was largely the consequence of an enduring “nobilism” [szlachetczyzna] that had been reinforced (and in part resurrected) by the post-1926 Sanacja regime. Similar anxieties about resurgent “nobilism” were also expressed in the Polish nationalist camp as well as by some peasant-friendly foreign observers. E. g., S. Miłkowski, Walka o nową Polskę (Warsaw, 1936), pp. 6 – 7; T. Koziełło, “Odchodząca elita. Problematyka szlachecko-ziemiańska na łamach “Myśli Narodowej” (1921– 1939)”, in E. Maj and W. Mich (eds), Anachroniczna kasta czy nowocześni obywatele? Problematyka ziemiańska na łamach prasy w Polsce od końca XIX stulecia do 1939 roku (Lublin, 2009), pp. 66 – 67; AZHRL, SL59, Q3 1935 report sent by the Czechoslovak Consulate in Kraków to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague.  J. Obrębski, Polesie, ed. B. Engelking (Warsaw, 2007), p. 515.

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peasants warned a group of female estate labourers that there would come a time when they would have to beg the estate to let them work for free.⁵¹ Equally, when asked what is meant by serfdom, one of the defendants at the subsequent trial specifically underscored the absence of remuneration, answering “a day’s worth of free labour”.⁵² This primarily economic focus on the absence of pay contrasts with the emphasis on serfdom’s hierarchical and coercive nature in most other interwar invocations of the term. A folk song composed around or soon after 1848 to celebrate the end of the corvée had similarly foregrounded the coerciveness of serfdom, rather than its economic unfairness, as its fundamental injustice.⁵³ As we will see, such was also the focus of much of the peasant memory tradition in the decades that followed. The shift of emphasis observable during the Lesko panic, thus, points to the contextual adaptability of the memory of serfdom, different aspects of which could lose or acquire salience depending on the peasants’ circumstances and the dangers they faced. In the 1930s the peasants in Lesko district were fully accustomed to supplementing their meagre agricultural yields with paid work. Accordingly, the re-enserfment they feared in 1932 was not one compelling them to work for the “lords” but one where they would have done so for free. The logic of their rebellion was more comparable to that of an industrial strike than a revolution: a protest against an unjust alteration within the wage labour nexus rather than an attempt to overthrow their semi-proletarian economic dependency altogether. Here, there was no trace of the folk “anarchism” of more autonomous or landed peasantries, determined – as the aforementioned folksong put it – “to rule one’s land as one wishes/as the lord does on his manor”.⁵⁴ On the contrary, for the unrest participants it was not immediately imaginable that someone might opt out of employment: in the re-feudalised future labourers would beg to be employed even if they received nothing in return. The fact that, in a changed context, peasants interpreted a novel danger as a subtly altered version of the past is indicative of the elasticity of the mental category of “serfdom”, its ability to survive contextual change and encompass a whole range of dangers within its conceptual reach. The triggers for the various re-enserfment panics were, indeed, highly diverse: a new patriotic celebration

 “Pro podii u lis’komu poviti”, Dilo (9 July 1932), p. 3.  Gazeta Lwowska (22 July 1932), p. 7.  “Pieśń oracza o Jakubie Szeli”, in J. Sieradzki and C. Wycech (eds), Rok 1846 w Galicji: materiały źródłowe (Warsaw, 1958), pp. 381– 382.  Ibid.; for more on peasant “anarchism”, see E.R. Wolf, “On peasant rebellions”, in T. Shanin (ed), Peasants and Peasant Societies (London, 1971), pp. 272– 273.

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previously unknown in peasant culture, a new tax, a road repair programme, even the unexpected movement of a local bigwig’s rubber stamp. A whiff of the unknown and a suspicion that “lords” were somehow involved were usually enough to spark such rumours. This apparent elasticity, however, was really a sign of its opposite, that is, the schematic rootedness of this mental category, its self-imposition on peasant understandings of reality regardless of contextual difference. Here, we run up against the limitations of what we might call an “objectivist” explanation of the persistence of rumours of re-enserfment. Socioeconomic continuities certainly made the memory of serfdom relevant. They cannot, however, explain why it was used to interpret so many different events. Given that re-enserfment was not really a threat by the late 19th century, the peasants’ view of the present must have been at least partially hostage to a mental timelag. The idea that such a time-lag existed was, in fact, commonplace in early 20th-century discussions around the peasantry. The phrase most typically used to evoke it was the “servile soul” (pańszczyźniana dusza). The phrase’s origins lay in the highly influential political text Two Souls (1904), penned by the Polish peasant writer and Reichsrat deputy Jakub Bojko. Bojko’s purpose was to condemn the servility that peasants continued to show towards traditional authority and the willingness of educated peasants to turn their backs on their peasant brothers at a time when traditional authority only possessed a shadow of its former leverage over peasant lives. In the essay’s opening pages, Bojko contrasted the precariousness that dominates the existence of various employees, all of whom can be sacked, with the (somewhat embellished) security of the postemancipation smallholder whose property could no longer be taken away from him. As long as taxes and debts were paid, conscripts provided to the state etc., Bojko addressed his peasant reader: “then you are a lord in all your essence, only death can evict you from your home […]”.⁵⁵ And yet, in spite of the tangible security that the peasant derived from his post-emancipation property rights, he still lacked the courage to act as if he were free. For Bojko the source of this contradiction was unmistakable: We continue to be inhabited by the soul of a very old, ugly lady, who died in the Lord’s year of 1848 and was called serfdom […] Her soul has dug so far into the peasant’s body that she does not dream of leaving it, even if her own corpse has been rotting for 60 years.⁵⁶

 J. Bojko, Dwie dusze (Warsaw, 1949), p. 19.  Idem, p. 16.

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Bojko’s reliance on the imagery of shadows, spirits and witches to convey serfdom’s lasting psychological consequences underscores the need to investigate the less obviously “material”, that is, cultural and discursive, practices that contributed to serfdom’s survival as a vital mental category. These are the focus of the remaining sections of this chapter. Here, my attention will turn from Lesko district, for which relatively few sources suited to cultural history are available, to the western, predominantly Polish-speaking half of Galicia. I will look at both the cultural mechanisms through which the memory of serfdom was perpetuated and the ways this memory interacted with the emergence of mass politics. It will be argued that many of the new discourses and practices that accompanied mass politics, far from marginalising the memory of serfdom, maintained and at times intensified its social presence. Moreover, the point of this new political engagement with serfdom was rarely just to celebrate the fact of its abolition. Rather, the memory of serfdom was mobilised in ways that underscored serfdom’s enduring effects and even its potential vitality in the present. Before getting to the uses of serfdom in more formalised political discourses, we should first attend to what were undoubtedly the most universal and farreaching channels by which the memory of serfdom was cultivated: the principally oral traditions of the village itself. To a large extent, the intergenerational transmission of this memory was a deliberate, even organised, effort on the peasants’ part. It took both private and officially commemorative forms and varied in its degree of publicness and subversiveness. At the more openly commemorative end were the crosses and chapels that popped up all over the East Galician (that is, mainly Ukrainian-speaking) countryside to memorialise the abolition of serfdom; it was at these sites that the deeds binding the peasants to their lords were traditionally thought to be buried.⁵⁷ One 20th-century memoirist from Lesko district, Helena Kucharz (born 1932), recounted how, upon receiving a document announcing the abolition of the corvée, her entire village had partaken in a mock funeral during which the document had been buried on the site of a future chapel.⁵⁸ Later in the 19th century, in another example of

 To my knowledge these commemorative sites have not been the object of any sustained academic treatment. The only discussions I know of have been in the press. E. g., A. Gorczyca, “Pogrzebali pańszczyznę i postawili na niej krzyż”, Gazeta Wyborcza – Rzeszów (4 May 2013), https:// rzeszow.wyborcza.pl/rzeszow/1,34962,13839875,Pogrzebali_panszczyzne_i_postawili_na_niej_ krzyz.html (accessed 1 July 2020); J. Majmurek, “Klekot: Jakub Szela podoba siȩ miastowym”, Krytyka Polityczna (11 April 2015), https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kraj/klekot-jakub-szela-podobasie-miastowym/?fbclid=IwAR2LcbHuTVzCaixhKS72WQt3ponG26tDfrGleUdR9Cj8tEE NUBb09YSs4kA (accessed 1 July 2020).  Janik and Orłowski, Myczkowce, pp. 20 – 21.

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the formalisation of memory, the nascent Ukrainian national movement managed to turn the anniversary of serfdom’s abolition into a feast day celebrated in Uniate churches.⁵⁹ Such commemorative practices designed to celebrate serfdom’s passing into history may appear to denote a more historicist mentality, confining serfdom to an irrevocable past. In practice though, they did not necessarily exorcise the fear of serfdom’s return. It was, after all, the “lords’” rumoured decision to dig up the documents buried under one such commemorative cross that helped instigate the Lesko unrest. Alongside these more formal practices, the traumas of serfdom were also kept alive by the stories of feudal suffering that were constantly being told and retold in village settings. Peasant memoirs from the early 20th century frequently refer to such narratives.⁶⁰ Though their mark was less tangible than that of crosses and chapels, through such stories the rural landscape was also inscribed with the scars of past suffering. Writing in the early 1970s, one memoirist reported that “various legends and stories” were still being told “about the meadow where today the municipal co-op has its warehouses but where under the feudal lords (za feudałów) corporal punishments would be meted out”.⁶¹ In her memoirs, the aforementioned Helena Kucharz also described how she could not walk past the ruins of the old manorial granary without reflecting on her grandmother’s oft-repeated words: “Child, the stones here have been soaked in many a drop of bloody sweat”.⁶² If stories of suffering have left a clear trace in the historical record, there is also another more submerged current of memory focused on resistance to serfdom, a current which – whilst widely known – could be harder to discuss approvingly for more politically sensitive memoirists.⁶³ The undoubted centrepiece of this memory tradition were the bloody events of 1846. In February 1846, two years before the abolition of corvée labour, patriotic intellectuals allied with a

 J-P. Himka, Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 1988), p. 57. During the interwar period the anniversary of serfdom’s abolition was also sporadically honoured by the youth group associated with the Polish-language peasant movement (ZMW RP “Wici”). Generally speaking, however, the custom never acquired much resonance in West Galicia.  According to Wincenty Witos, for instance, “information about serfdom and the awful practices carried out on the peasants by the lords towered over [other historical narratives]” in his native village. Witos, Moje wspomnienia, p. 85.  AZHRL, O-480, K. Radomski, “Kronika założenia i rozwoju ruchu ludowego w Kamieniu, pow. Nisko, woj. rzeszowskie (1973)”, p. 10.  Janik and Orłowski, Myczkowce, p. 20.  Indeed, ordinary peasants also likely kept this memory tradition largely to themselves in recognition of its taboo nature. Sieradzki and Wycech, Rok 1846, p. 367.

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section of the Polish gentry conspired to launch a national revolution against Austrian rule. In doing so, they hoped to enlist peasant support with a promise of social emancipation. In response, the Austrian authorities in Tarnów district called on the peasants to disarm the insurgents, whilst assuring them of imperial support. As rumours of an anti-peasant noble revolt spread, peasants in the Tarnów region heeded the authorities’ call and embarked on an anti-seigneurial jacquerie. Animated by their hatred for the lords and an enduring loyalty to the imperial regime that had alleviated serfdom soon after the first Partition of Poland, the Galician peasantry went on to plunder over 400 manors and slaughter around 1200 persons, including landowners, estate officials and clergymen.⁶⁴ The events of 1846 left a long-lasting scar on elite national consciousness, entrenching mistrust towards popular emancipation. For many peasants, however, the associations of 1846 were of an altogether different complexion. The transformation of the jacquerie’s leader Jakub Szela into a folk hero is, for instance, widely attested.⁶⁵ Multiple songs extolling the massacres survived into the 20th century and could even provide a chilling script for moments of confrontation with non-peasant society. In the late 1930s, on an expedition to a Galician village, the ethnographer Kazimiera Zawistowicz-Adamska was, for example, taunted by village lads who had gathered outside her window with the following chant: “Do you remember, oh lord, the year of forty-six,/ When for Carnival the peasants beat you with sticks?”⁶⁶ Around the same time, a rural headmistress from the village of Nieznanowice provided a particularly evocative sketch of the long shadow cast over rural life by 1846. The sketch came about in response to a survey organised in 1937 by the school office of the Kraków area, in which schoolteachers were asked to report on any possible references to the revolutionary events of 1846 in their school chronicles.⁶⁷ As most schools in rural Galicia were only founded decades later, the majority of responses was negative, but some respondents nevertheless took the task to heart. The Nieznanowice headmistress was one such respondent, providing the school office with a distressed five-page report on how 1846 was remembered in her village. The picture she painted was one of

 S. Kieniewicz, The Emancipation of the Polish Peasantry (Chicago, 1969), p. 122.  E. g., Sieradzki and Wycech, Rok 1846, pp. 367– 382.  “Pamiȩtos ty panie rok śtyrdziesty szósty/ Jak ciȩ chłopy biły kijami w zapusty?” Cited in K. Zawistowicz-Adamska, Społeczność wiejska: wspomnienia i materiały z badań terenowych: Zaborów 1937 – 38 (Warsaw, 1958), pp. 31– 32.  AZHRL, Zbiory Czesława Wycecha 7. The information and quotations in this paragraph are all sourced from this archival file.

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congealed social polarisation befitting of a post-conflict zone.⁶⁸ “Nieznanowice and Gdów [the two local manors that had been targeted in 1846],” she wrote, “will remain stuck in the area’s memory for many centuries to come, for generations pass on from one to the next not only a portrayal of this experience but also the surnames of victims and avengers alike.” Local life seemed to resonate with echoes of the conflict even in its banal details. The orphaned son of one of the landowners killed in 1846 became a drunk and spent the rest of his life in taverns, “getting into bar fights with peasants for killing his parents”. Recently, the headmistress reported, the deceased noble’s estate had been bought up by a local peasant, who “cleared what remained of the beautiful park and turned it into fields, as if he hoped to cover up the memory of 1846”. Nor were her predictions for the future any less bleak: Many individuals have tried to win the [peasants’] trust in various ways and to ennoble this rocky ground, but how? After all, there are still such people around whose fathers and grandfathers got flogged by the lords – and they recount this to the youngsters, to their grandchildren.

III The politicisation of anti-seigneurial sentiment Given the emotional charge of the peasant memory of serfdom and the seemingly universal hostility that it elicited, it was perhaps inevitable that various political actors would try to tap into this emotion as soon as mass politics reached the Galician countryside in the early 20th century. The adjectival form of serfdom, pańszczyźniany (which, for ease of understanding, I will translate as “seigneurial”⁶⁹), would soon be commonly employed on all sides of the political spectrum – though most habitually by the various peasant parties – to delegitimise the policies and practices of opponents. Given the existence of real continuities between the pre- and post-1848 periods, there was, of course, a degree of empirical justification for such analogies.

 It should be noted, nevertheless, that in some Galician villages peasants had actually tried to protect their lords from the marauding mob. At least one respondent referred to this in the survey. In the world of local communal rivalries, this could even become a source of village pride and a basis for claims to moral distinction vis-à-vis neighbouring communities. E. g., K. DudaDziewierz, Wieś małopolska a emigracja amerykańska: studium wsi Babica powiatu rzeszowskiego (Warsaw/Poznań, 1938), pp. 11– 12; Sieradzki and Wycech, Rok 1846, p. 372.  See footnote 2.

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However, analogies and comparisons were not always empirically grounded to the same degree. Increasingly, in the age of mass politics, “serfdom” assumed the role of a floating signifier – a process of semantic loosening that was doubtless facilitated by the peasants’ own tendency to see all that was strange and sinister through its lens. The political implication of this process was that a wide range of social and political players and policies could now be cast in the discursive role of would-be enserfers. In the years after the Russian Revolution, when various schemes of land reform were at the centre of political debate in East-Central Europe, it became customary on the Right to label the real and at times imagined collectivist visions of the Left “seigneurial”.⁷⁰ After returning to Poland from the 1929 congress of the Communist Peasant International (Krestintern) in Moscow, a female peasant delegate from the Masovian Sochaczew district even felt the need to rebut the daily claims “we hear and read in the bourgeois press and the socialist or democratic newspapers”, according to which the Soviets were “chasing the peasants off the land and turning these peasants into seigneurial farmhands”. Notably, rather than reject attempts to frame the modern present in terms of the feudal past, the writer simply reversed the accusation, arguing that “in reality it is the other way round – we [in Poland] are the ones who have serfdom, as we have to work for the bourgeoisie”.⁷¹ In another example of its semantic elasticity, the memory of serfdom could be mobilised in the service of a generic anti-urban and anti-establishment sentiment, enabling a depiction of the towns and the various threatening “Others” associated with them as the countryside’s neo-feudal oppressor. During the Great Depression, when the oppositional nationalist Right attacked the government’s support for industrial cartelisation and simultaneously intensified its campaign against the Jews, one nationalist newspaper despaired at how “the current position of the farmer in Poland is greatly reminiscent of that of the serf, for he truly performs a heavy corvée for the industrial cartels and the various castes and classes of the urban population, especially the Jews”.⁷²

 Similarly, the Soviet collectivisation of agriculture was regularly compared to or conflated with re-enserfment. E. g., “Rosja sowiecka przywróciła pańszczyznȩ”, Gazeta Grudziądzka (10 March 1936).  Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv (TsDIAL), f. 351, op. 1, sp. 5, TSK “Sel’-rob” L’viv.  “Walka z handlem żydowskim”, Zorza, Wieniec i Pszczółka (13 Jan. 1935), p. 17, cited in E. Maj, “Lud wiejski: włościanin i narodowiec. Problematyka chłopska na łamach tygodnika “Zorza” w latach 1918 – 1939”, in E. Maj, W. Mich and M. Wichmanowski (eds), Egoistyczna klasa czy odpowiedzialni współobywatele? Problematyka chłopska na łamach prasy w Polsce od końca XIX stulecia do 1939 roku (Lublin, 2010), p. 73.

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As if to justify such increasingly far-fetched usages of the concept, political actors at times softened their references to contemporary “serfdom” with a range of qualifiers. Thus, the servile attitude cultivated by the post-1926 Sanacja government in its auxiliary organisations was characterised as “political serfdom” by one leading peasant newspaper,⁷³ whilst the bullying of small retailers by powerful industrial interests constituted a form of “serfdom in commerce” [emphases mine] according to an article in the newspaper of rural shopkeepers.⁷⁴ Qualifiers like this may have signalled a degree of metaphorical intent to readers (or at least the more discerning amongst them); at the same time, political actors were rarely keen to make the rhetorical nature of their anti-seigneurial language completely transparent. After all, the resonance of this language depended on its capacity to evoke the memory of serfdom or even to flirt with fears of serfdom’s return. A certain ambiguity about how literally it should be read stood to enhance its emotional power. Consequently, oscillation between strong and weak, literal and metaphorical imputations of seigneurialism was a common feature of this kind of political language. The aforementioned article about “serfdom in commerce”, for example, began with a constative statement that suggested the ensuing charge of seigneurialism was meant to be understood literally: “Corvée labour is any kind of work, for which one is not remunerated, but which one is obliged to perform.” By the second sentence, a pair of scare quotes insinuated that a metaphorical reading might, in fact, be better-suited to the case in question: “Polish retailers perform such a ‘corvée’ in their sale of salt and sugar.”⁷⁵ In another case of such oscillation, a headline in a newspaper of the peasant Left unabashedly proclaimed: “They want serfdom to return so they can carry on oppressing the peasant”, only for the possibility “that the 20th century might restore the yoke of unfreedom” to be dismissed in the article itself.⁷⁶ A fortnight earlier, the same newspaper had played on peasant fears in an even more suggestive manner, printing a poem about how social elites were obstructing peasant unity, in which the opening image bore an uncanny resemblance to the spectre of noble conspiracy that would later haunt the Lesko rebels:

 “Pańszczyzna polityczna”, Piast (25 Sept. 1932), p. 3, cited in B. Jakubowska, Ruch ludowy wobec przeszłości narodowej (do 1939 r.) (Warsaw, 1995), p. 118. As Jakubowska points out, the phrase “political serfdom” gained broader currency in the peasant movement during the 1930s.  J. Sirota, “Pańszczyzna w handlu”, Kupiec Wiejski (1 Jan. 1938), pp. 2– 3.  Ibid.  J. Szafranek, “Chcą aby wróciła pańszczyzna by gnȩbić nadal chłopa”, Gazeta Chłopska (14 Oct. 1928), p. 2.

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It was in Dogville that the lords had their meeting arranged… To conspire about locking the peasant in chains, To ensure that of land and power he wouldn’t dare squeal… They invited black devils to join in this deal […]⁷⁷

Proof of the social resonance of this more politicised anti-seigneurialism can occasionally be found in the peasant memoirs that were written en masse in interwar Poland. Here, right-wing and left-wing anti-seigneurialism could easily blend. A case in point is offered by the 1935 memoir of Andrzej Postrożny, a 61-year-old sympathiser of PSL Piast, the right-wing party of the Polish peasant movement. Recalling the 1926 coup by Józef Piłsudski, a former socialist who came to power by overthrowing, with the aid of the Left, a government led by PSL Piast, Postrożny wrote: And so the year of 1926 came, the month of May, the month of the Most Holy Virgin, our [Polish] Queen, this was the moment chosen by J. Piłsudski when, supported by socialists and other fans of serfdom, he overthrew the government of Witos by force. And that’s when the cat came out of the bag! The common folk suddenly saw who would really wield power. Army colonels, landowners, capitalists grabbed the government for themselves […] A government of gentry fascists [emphases mine]!⁷⁸

In just two sentences Postrożny moved seamlessly from the anti-seigneurial language of the peasant Right, in which socialism and serfdom were often conflated, to the equally anti-seigneurial critique of the post-1926 regime⁷⁹ – this time laced with a democratic anti-fascism – that the now united peasant movement embraced as it moved leftwards in the 1930s. Postrożny’s casual identification of the peasants’ various political adversaries with seigneurial forces shows how the arrival of modern mass politics could paradoxically entrench the perceived proximity of the pre- and post-emancipation age in peasant understandings. The political mobilisation of “serfdom” as a delegitimising discursive frame meant that “serfdom” was – in one form or another – perpetuated as a contemporary threat to the peasantry. Already high in salience due to the socioeconomic continuities and traditions of memory trans-

 “W Psiej Wólce siȩ zjechały na naradȩ pany…/ Radzą jak zakuć chłopa na wieki w kajdany,/ By nie śmiał nawet pisnąć o władzy i ziemi…/ Zawrzeć pakt uradzili z djabłami czarnemi […]” M. Kossowski (Izbica nad Wieprzem), “Skąd idzie zło dla chłopa”, Gazeta Chłopska (30 Sept. 1928), p. 5.  Warsaw, Archiwum Szkoły Głównej Handlowej [ASGH], Archiwum IGS, 443, A. Postrożny, “Życiorys społecznego działacza ludowego” (Stara Wieś, powiat limanowski), pp. 54– 55.  See footnote 49.

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mission discussed in previous sections, the social memory and resentment of serfdom were, thus, further reinforced through the political realm.

IV Peasant nationalism as anti-feudal critique Whilst the wizards of mass politics sought to channel the anti-seigneurial energies of the countryside, conservative forces used the very existence of such energies as an argument with which to forestall the emergence of mass politics altogether. The memory of 1846, of the brutality and national disloyalty that the peasants had shown, was a potent resource in mobilising elite opinion against the Polish peasant movement from the moment of its inception in the 1890s.⁸⁰ Comparing the peasant movement to the 1846 jacquerie and its leaders to Jakub Szela, the jacquerie leader, became a routine practice, employed to discredit peasant participation in public life and, once conservatives had accepted the irreversibility of mass politics, to delegitimise more independent-spirited and class-based peasant parties.⁸¹ Keen to prove both their patriotic credentials and their parliamentary respectability, peasant leaders frequently disavowed any such association with the actions of Szela. Indeed, early peasant leaders and peasant-friendly elites invested considerable energy in spreading the cult of established national heroes to the countryside, in the hope not just of winning the peasants over to Polish nationalism but also, in the process, neutralising elite mistrust. Easily the most successful amongst these new cult figures was Tadeusz Kościuszko. A general in the army of pre-partition Poland, Kościuszko derived the demotic appeal he acquired in the late 19th and early 20th century from the manner in which he had sought to halt Poland’s loss of independence.⁸² By announcing a national uprising in 1794 with

 By contrast, for the various strategies employed by the progressive intelligentsia with a view to diminishing peasant responsibility for 1846 or even exonerating the peasants entirely, see F. Ziejka, Złota legenda chłopów polskich (Warsaw, 1984), chapter 6.  E. g., Bojko, Dwie dusze, p. 60; AZHRL, SL14 A, “Lepiej nie wywoływać widma Szeli”, Gazeta Grudziądzka (6 Sept. 1932), p. 2.  Prior to the propagandistic efforts of peasant and national activists in the late 19th century, Kościuszko’s status in peasant memory had been much more ambivalent. According to Witos, during his youth in the late 19th century, Kościuszko was considered “a criminal who rebelled against divinely ordained authority and was severely punished for it”. Witos, Moje wspomnienia, p. 85.

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a levée en masse, [Kościuszko] brought serfs and gentry together, fighting side-by-side for the first time in Polish history. The general’s promise of land and freedom to his serf-soldiers after the war, a promise he honoured in his “Manifesto of Połaniec”, epitomized the peasants’ vision of the new Poland. The uprising even offered a specific example of peasant patriotic sacrifice in the famous Battle of Racławice, won by peasant scythebearers charging Russian guns.⁸³

For the Polish peasant movement Kościuszko was almost predestined to incarnate the perfect anti-Szela. Where Szela had represented the irreconcilability of class and national emancipation, the Kościuszko cult showed how the national and the social cause could become one. In this political vision, embraced by many peasant activists at the turn of the 20th century, national solidarity demonstratively took the place of social vengeance. The half-hidden memory of antifeudal resistance – above all, of 1846 – was now eclipsed by a new mythology of patriotic peasant action, a mythology that could be celebrated in the open, through processions, rallies, speeches, battle re-enactments and a whole range of other performative acts. So extensive was this ideological reorientation that even the emancipation of the serfs, which most 19th-century peasants had viewed as an imperial gift wrenched from a hostile Polish nobility, would now be recast in the minds of some peasant patriots as an achievement attributable above all to progressive Polish nationalism.⁸⁴ By transforming how the nation and its elites were viewed, the Kościuszko cult – and, more broadly, peasant nationalism – undoubtedly helped suppress the most visceral peasant fears according to which serfdom would return if

 K. Stauter-Halsted, “Patriotic Celebrations in Austrian Poland: The Kościuszko Centennial and the Formation of Peasant Nationalism”, Austrian History Yearbook, 25 (1994), p. 82.  In 1912, at a patriotic celebration in Grodzisko-Miasteczko, one peasant reportedly gave a speech celebrating the rights granted to the peasants by the Constitution of 3 May 1791, a last-ditch attempt by parts of the Polish nobility to strengthen the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and thereby save it from the expansionist designs of its neighbours. After detailing the jus primae noctis that the nobility had once (supposedly) exercised in Grodzisko, he concluded by extolling the Constitution which “freed our ancestors and us from the yoke and villainy of their lordships”. In reality, Galicia and, by extension, Grodzisko-Miasteczko would not have been affected by the Constitution, having been under Austrian rule since 1772; equally, in remaining parts of Poland the 1791 Constitution was snuffed out well before it could have any lasting effect on rural social relations. Meanwhile, in another instance of the conflation of narratives of social and national emancipation, the 50th anniversary of the abolition of serfdom was celebrated in Tarnobrzeg district with a re-enactment of the 1794 Battle of Racławice. Archiwum Państwowe w Rzeszowie [APRze], z. 1246, sygn. 13928, Antoni Mach, Nowy pamiȩtnik chłopski, pp. 1– 2; Wiejscy działacze społeczni, vol. I: Pamiętniki włościan (2 vols, Warsaw, 1937), p. 209.

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the “lordly” Polish state were ever reinstated.⁸⁵ Nevertheless, it would be wrong to take the rise of peasant nationalism as a sign that Polish peasants considered the feudal order dead in the water. In its own way the Kościuszko tradition testified to the opposite: a belief in the enduring vitality of the (post‐)feudal order and a desire to enter into dialogue with it. A reading of peasant nationalism as a form of performative engagement with other social groups is not entirely without precedent. Keely Stauter-Halsted’s study of the turn-of-the-century Kościuszko celebrations, for instance, also framed these as a kind of contractual offer put forward to national elites: “support for a national agenda in return for attention to the concerns of the rural population”.⁸⁶ It is possible to take this contractual analogy further and discern in the Kościuszko cult the outlines of a peasant polemic with the moral foundations, the social contract as it were, of a feudal society of orders. At heart, the constant memorialisation of the peasants’ moment of military sacrifice presented a challenge to the social division of labour and claims of inter-estate reciprocity on which feudal hierarchy was originally based: if the peasants were willing to take up arms and thereby perform the duties of the nobility – duties which the nobility had, in fact, neglected – why could it not exercise the political and social rights of the nobility as well? This anti-feudal challenge had already been implicit in the slogan of Kościuszko’s peasant-soldiers, “They Feed and They Defend” (Żywią i bronią), which would later be picked up and popularised by the 20th-century peasant movement. Nevertheless, at the turn of the 20th century, the anti-feudal edge of peasant nationalism frequently remained veiled, even blunted, by an idiom of national solidarism. Situations of conflict, however, could easily encourage it to coarsen. This was particularly visible in the interwar period, when the peasant movement grew bolder in its political claims, methods and language and when the mobilisation of peasant nationalism for the purposes of anti-seigneurial critique also became increasingly explicit. If the nobility owed its ownership of the land to its historical defence of the realm, argued one 1925 article in a newspaper of the peasant Right, then by rights some of the same land should now be handed over to the peasants who had defended Poland against the Boshevik invaders of 1920.⁸⁷ Meanwhile, a 1927 article in a newspaper of the peasant

 K. Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848 – 1914 (Ithaca, 2004), p. 244.  Stauter-Halsted, “Patriotic Celebrations”, p. 95.  “Panowie wziȩli siȩ do ratunku swoich majątków: List z Warszawy”, Piast (27 Sept. 1925), p. 3, cited in M. Wichmanowski, “Niezapomniane krzywdy, zawieszone nadzieje. Problematyka

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Left pointed out the hypocrisy of historical claims to feudal reciprocity in light of Poland’s loss of independence in the late 18th century: “the peasants fulfilled their burdensome duty of feeding the entire nation and they fulfil it till this day, but did the nobility perform its duty of defending Poland?”⁸⁸ In a similar vein, a booklet by the long-standing peasant politician Tomasz Nocznicki, entitled What Peasants Ought to Know about Serfdom, gave centre stage in its extended attack on the atrocities and ideology of serfdom to a long list of peasant attempts to defend Poland in its moment of need, only to be thwarted by a nobility that did not wish to arm its serfs.⁸⁹ Such agonistic engagement with feudal ideology was not limited to the polemical columns of the peasant press. Rather, the narrative model of unrewarded peasant sacrifice for the nation and the indictment of social elites that it implied informed political strategies and behaviours on a much wider scale. During the increasingly authoritarian 1930s it again provided the moral structure for peasant political claims when, in 1936, the peasant movement instituted an annual holiday (the so-called “Feast Day of Peasant Action”; Święto Czynu Chłopskiego) to commemorate the peasant contribution to the defence of Poland against the Bolsheviks in 1920. This was a deliberate provocation to national political elites and the spirit of “nobilism”⁹⁰ they represented, a reminder of the quasi-feudal injustice they committed by denying Poland’s true defenders their political and social rights. In the same decade, it also became practically de rigueur at peasant rallies and protests to recite the 19th-century radical anthem Gdy naród do boju (“When the people went to fight”), in which a deeply ironic tribute is paid to the nobility for its betrayal of Poland and contrasted with the patriotic fighting spirit of the common folk.⁹¹

ziemiaństwa na łamach tygodnika “Piast” w latach 1918 – 1939”, in Maj and Mich, Anachroniczna kasta czy nowocześni obywatele?, p. 120.  A. Waleron, “Polityka szlachty”, Gazeta Chłopska (12 June 1927), pp. 7– 8.  T. Nocznicki, Co chłopi powinni o pańszczyźnie wiedzieć (Warsaw, 1935).  See footnote 49.  At the same time, the anthem’s appeal went well beyond its challenge to feudal hierarchies, doubtless owing much to its more general message of class hatred and revenge. Indeed, prior to its dissemination amongst the peasantry, it had been a popular song in the 19th-century socialist movement. D. Wawrzykowska-Wierciochowa, “‘Gdy naród do boju wystąpił z orężem’…(Dzieje życia Gustawa Ehrenberga i jego pieśni)”, Roczniki Dziejów Ruchu Ludowego, 4 (1962), pp. 161– 167.

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V Serfdom in the political culture of the peasant movement By now, it should hopefully be clear that, even if peasant nationalism tended to downgrade the memory of violent anti-feudal resistance, in some of its preferred narrative forms it nevertheless continued this resistance by other means. With varying degrees of implicitness, peasant nationalism maintained the social order that had produced serfdom as its discursive opponent. Serfdom, however, was also present in the peasant movement’s political discourse and thinking in more visible ways than that of a ghostly interlocutor. As shown in section III, peasant parties were active participants in the broader politicisation of anti-seigneurial sentiment. Unlike for other political actors, however, anti-seigneurial language was more than just a rhetorical instrument for the peasant movement. Rather, the struggle for peasant emancipation from serfdom and its legacies was central to its identity and ideology. By encouraging peasants to take an interest in their collective past and imagine their contemporary preoccupations as part of a larger historical struggle, the peasant movement sharpened its adherents’ ability to discern the contemporary legacies of serfdom and the continuities between past and present forms of rural injustice. An intensified interest in the history and legacies of serfdom became particularly visible in the 1930s, when the balance between national, i. e. Polish, and social, i. e. peasant, identity within the peasant movement increasingly shifted in favour of the latter. Underlying this was the movement’s broader leftward turn and mounting hostility to the post1926 regime and the social elites that supported it. Connectedly, the 1930s saw an effort by the peasant youth movement ZMW RP “Wici” (henceforth Wici) to shake off the cultural hegemony of other social groups and foster an independent peasant culture that would be both constructed by peasant protagonists and based on peasant cultural resources. Whilst this drive to construct and elevate “peasantness” was organisationally driven, it did not occur in detachment from already existing elements of peasant culture – a culture in which, as we have seen, tales of feudal suffering were already a fundamental building block of intergenerational identities. Peasantist political discourse absorbed this theme of historic oppression and bestowed on it a new degree of intensity and prominence. A measure of how entrenched the trope of peasant suffering became can be derived from the aforementioned memoir of Andrzej Postrożny, an author who, as we saw earlier, was well-versed in the political idiom of the peasant movement. Whilst his memoir relied on standardised narrative tools used to invoke peasant suffering, it is striking how much these jarred with the way in which

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Postrożny actually lived his life. The memoir’s preface opened with a relatively routine plea for patience on the reader’s part with regards to the poor quality of Postrożny’s writing, the result of his “not being a ‘professor’, but a lousy pupil who has been out of school for 45 years”; it ended with a “tribute to the work that is being done for the good of us, the peasants who have been oppressed for centuries”. Based on this introduction, a seasoned reader of peasant memoirs might already expect a story about a young peasant’s desire for education and a better existence being thwarted by life circumstances, a narrative of which we can find many examples in the “genre”. This life-trajectory, however, did not apply to Postrożny. Born into a wealthy peasant family in 1874, he was sent first to a primary school in a nearby town and then to a gymnasium in an even further one, at a time when most Galician children barely received any formal schooling. Problematically, however, Postrożny did not crave education or social mobility; instead, in the face of considerable parental resistance, he returned home to the farm. As punishment for his decision, Postrożny’s father denied him an adequate bridewealth to marry the girl he loved; in protest, Postrożny set sail for America. Here, Postrożny befriended a wealthy Silesian innkeeper who offered him one of his daughters in marriage. As he considered what to do, Postrożny discovered that his father had relented and agreed to offer him a patch of land as bridewealth. “[…] Without hesitation I abandoned this happiness that lay beyond the seas,” Postrożny wrote, “and I gave priority to my girl Kasia and this grey peasant plight [emphasis mine]”. ⁹² In short, even when peasant life was chosen voluntarily and with enthusiasm, the rhetorical baggage it demanded was still frequently that of involuntary, class-specific suffering.⁹³ A political culture that gave such prominence to class suffering also offered propitious grounds for a blossoming historical interest in serfdom, especially in the context of the broader shift towards social radicalism that the peasant movement underwent in the 1930s. The growth of this interest is particularly easy to trace in the changing literary tastes of the activist peasantry. The aforementioned 1935 booklet on serfdom by Tomasz Nocznicki was, for instance, commissioned

 ASGH, Archiwum IGS, 443, Postrożny, “Życiorys działacza”, pp. 1– 3, 30 – 31.  The plebeian tendency to use memoirs as a way of airing social grievances did not pass unremarked in the interwar period and was, in fact, the object of some public debate. More recently, whilst conducting fieldwork in the Biebrza valley in 1993, one Polish ethnographer became so irritated (and subsequently fascinated) by a similar discursive tendency as to redirect his study towards the subject of “peasant moaning”. K. Lebow, “Autobiography as Complaint: Polish Social Memoir between the World Wars”, Laboratorium, 6/3 (2014), pp. 13 – 26; P. Kȩdziorek, “Chłopskie zrzȩdzenie”, Polska Sztuka Ludowa – Konteksty, 50/1– 2 (1996), pp. 114– 123.

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in response to the “great interest in the peasants’ history in Poland” that had begun to manifest “amongst the more enlightened peasants”.⁹⁴ A survey of the books that were most regularly mentioned and appreciated in interwar peasant memoirs has similarly revealed a preference for works dealing with historic rural injustices.⁹⁵ The author Leon Kruczkowski, whose bestselling novel “Kordian and the Boor” [Kordian i cham] (1932) gave a searing portrayal of the deep social oppression that prevailed in the early 19th century, a heroic time of national struggle in elite memory, even achieved semi-celebrity status in some Wici circles.⁹⁶ Also widely read and discussed were non-fiction works such as Józef Putek’s macabre-sounding “Gloom of the Middle Ages” [Mroki Średniowiecza] (1935), a catalogue of the “superstitions, fanaticism and cruelty” implanted in European society – often at the peasants’ expense – by the Catholic Church, as well as Aleksander Świętochowski’s “History of the Polish Peasants” [Historia chłopów polskich] (1925),⁹⁷ described by Nocznicki as “a terrible indictment of the Polish nobility for the crimes it committed against the peasants for around 600 years”.⁹⁸ Such literary predilections offered a stark contrast to those of the non-activist peasantry, which – by various accounts – did not read much or else, when it did, shunned literature by and about the peasants in favour of the escapist thrills of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s historical novels, in which it was the heroic feats of (principally noble) protagonists that were celebrated.⁹⁹ For those who read or brushed against this new peasant-centred historical literature, a past that already heaved with localised stories of peasant suffering now became even more oppressive. To do justice to the darkness of this past (and in a reflection of the new literature’s influence), a new style of almost Gothic his-

 Nocznicki, Co chłopi powinni…, p. 2.  A. Zdanowicz, “Czytelnictwo chłopów w okresie Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej w świetle materiałów pamiętnikarskich (wybrane zagadnienia)”, in H. Czachowski and V. Wróblewska (eds), Kultura wsi w egodokumentach (Toruń, 2016), pp. 181– 196. A survey of the literary preferences of Wici circles carried out in 1936 also revealed the importance of peasant-oriented literature in their literary diet, with Kruczkowski’s Kordian i cham reported as the most popular novel. By contrast, by 1947, mainstream literary classics had overtaken peasant-oriented literature in most Wici circles’ reported literary preferences. S. Jarecka-Kimlowska, Związek Młodzieży Wiejskiej “Wici” 1944 – 1948 (Warsaw, 1972), p. 213.  Zdanowicz, “Czytelnictwo chłopów”, p. 189.  Idem, p. 191.  Świętochowski’s history was, in fact, much more ambivalent in its judgement of the nobility’s role in Polish history. Nocznicki’s one-sided reading, however, was typical amongst peasant politicians. Nocznicki, Co chłopi powinni…, pp. 3 – 4; Jakubowska, Ruch ludowy, pp. 135 – 136.  S. Pigoń, Na drogach i manowcach kultury ludowej: szkice (Lwów, 1939), pp. 21– 22; J. Zamorski, “Czytelnictwo wiejskie”, Wieś i Państwo, 2/6 (1939), pp. 440 – 442.

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toricism sometimes took root in peasant thought and language. Having read Świętochowski’s history with great suffering, one Wici member and memoirist who lived close to the magnificent Potocki palace in Łańcut could not even walk past the palace grounds without meditating upon the centuries of peasant labour that had been poured into its trees, roads, 365 rooms, cellars, and underground dungeons where many a bolder peasant thought was muted and, through its muteness, would speak of peasant misery […] [Even] the boughs of the old oaks and limes, which had grown up according to the ius primae noctis [prawem pierwszej nocy], seemed to whisper: “we are not allowed, we must be silent like you […] bow down like we do”.¹⁰⁰

To convey the injustice of Count Alfred Potocki’s half-hearted participation in the interwar land reform, the post-1945 memoirist (and former Wici member) Jan Stryczek – also from Łańcut district – similarly turned, for moral context, to the distant past and the historic injustices perpetrated by Potocki’s ancestors against the peasants. To this end, Stryczek offered the reader a lurid list of historical abuses going back to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth when “as the historian will tell you, the lords of Łańcut would warm their legs during winter hunts by cutting open peasant bellies”, as well as ordering their serfs to climb up trees for shooting practice and severing the hands of other lords’ serfs during private wars.¹⁰¹ Such invocations of (often grisly) historical injustices were a common mechanism for emboldening contemporary peasant claims and grievances in the interwar period. Landowners need not be compensated for confiscated land, one politician of the peasant Left argued, for since the 16th century “land […] had been stolen from the peasants by the nobility without any compensation”.¹⁰² At an

 ASGH, Archiwum IGS, 445, A. Dziaduś, “W ogniu pragnień” (Dȩbina, pow. łańcucki, 1936), p. 13.  The first of these claims was a longstanding trope directly lifted from anti-feudal discourses in 18th-century France. Ironically, in Poland it was originally deployed in the writings of various 19th- and 20th-century intellectuals (including the aforementioned Aleksander Świętochowski, whose history of the peasants was likely where Stryczek encountered it), who followed French polemicists in attributing such atrocities to the pre-1789 French seigneurs and, in so doing, sought to relativise abuses by Poland’s comparatively more humane landowners. In light of the trope’s original functions in the Polish public sphere, Stryczek’s transformation of it into an argument against the Polish nobility truly represents a case of creative reception. Stryczek, Chłopskim piórem (Warsaw, 1957), pp. 236 – 237; A. Leszczyński, “Czy chłopom na Zachodzie było gorzej niż w Polsce?”, Krytyka Polityczna (14 Nov. 2020), https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/historia/ adam-leszczynski-fragment-ksiazki-ludowa-historia-polski/ (accessed 20 Jan. 2021).  J. Dąbski, “Reforma rolna bez odszkodowania”, Gazeta Chłopska (5 June 1927), pp. 4– 5.

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anti-government rally in the early 1930s, another political activist interwove his political demands with the story of a peasant who, after marrying without his lord’s consent, was buried alive alongside his spouse, such that the vow of not severing their marital bond that the lord had made to the priest would still be honoured.¹⁰³ In all these instances, new, non-local, but emotionally charged, knowledge about the feudal past helped give new intensity to local memories of serfdom and to present-day perceptions of its unjust legacies. Also symptomatic of the political tendencies of the 1930s was the process by which the positive memory of 1846, long suppressed by peasant leaders, ceased to be considered taboo. Pushing this memory sublimation was the left flank of the peasant movement and the communists who sometimes infiltrated it. An undoubted turning point came with the publication in 1926 of a folksy narrative poem by futurist-turned-communist Bruno Jasieński, in which the 1846 leader Jakub Szela was presented in a positive light.¹⁰⁴ After first attracting the praise of the urban labour movement, the poem began to be staged as a play in workers’ theatres, before also being added to the theatrical repertoire of the Wici movement’s “folk university” (uniwersytet ludowy) at Gać Przeworska.¹⁰⁵ As interest in a less patriotic kind of peasant history grew in the 1930s, so the events of 1846 began to attract the academic and journalistic attention of intellectuals within the peasant movement, as well as being subject to a process of literary revalorisation by writers in this cultural milieu.¹⁰⁶ As a result, the peasants’ “hidden transcript” of anti-feudal resistance, long side-lined in the peasant movement’s “public transcript” of peasant patriotism, would gain a degree of public visibility in the 1930s.¹⁰⁷ One final way in which the peasant movement consolidated the enduring cultural presence of serfdom was through the rhetorical apparatus it constructed for its war on peasant backwardness. The need for such a rhetorical apparatus takes us to the heart of tensions within early 20th-century agrarian ideology, both in Poland and Europe as a whole. Whilst claiming to stand for the preser APRze, z. 1246, sygn. 13859, J. Kula, “Walki grodziskie w r. 1933”, p. 8. Given this recollection was written after the war, it is possible the anti-feudalism of the original speech was embellished to ingratiate the author with the Communist authorities.  B. Jasieński, “Słowo o Jakóbie Szeli”, https://wolnelektury.pl/media/book/pdf/slowo-o-ja kobie-szeli.pdf (accessed 20 Jan. 2021).  Ziejka, Złota legenda chłopów, p. 252.  Idem, pp. 257– 258. Amidst this turn from nation to class, from national solidarity to peasant struggle, some intellectuals in the peasant movement even began to disavow the cult of Kościuszko as a form of servile “false consciousness”. This, however, was a decidedly fringe position. Jakubowska, Ruch ludowy, p. 179.  J.C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven CT, 1990).

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vation of peasantness, in crucial respects agrarian movements were actually committed to its destruction, be it through the modernisation of agricultural methods, the promotion of education or the spread of modern forms of leisure at the expense of more established, if less enlightened, variants.¹⁰⁸ This was not a contradiction that could be easily admitted. What made it manageable in part was that many Polish peasantist leaders believed the most negative aspects of rural life to be the historical legacies of serfdom rather than essential peasant features. Underlying this was a historical vision which construed serfdom as an alien imposition on peasant (or indeed Polish) history – a tumour grafted onto the democratic, Slavic ur-culture that had predominated in the early to high Middle Ages.¹⁰⁹ The resultant distinction between true peasantness and feudal legacies would prove of great instrumental value. It made it possible to reimagine initiatives of cultural and social reform as quasi-archaeological exercises, their purpose being not to transform peasantness but to free it of serfdom’s sedimented effects. We can see this mode of argumentation in the peasant movement’s calls for abstinence from alcohol. To discredit alcohol’s cultural legitimacy, these would often point to how vodka consumption was rooted in seigneurial propination laws that had given lords a monopoly on alcohol production and sales and even obliged peasants to buy alcohol from their lords.¹¹⁰ The same basic argument structure could also serve to advance more eccentric positions or even to promote causes that were not truly supported by the peasant movement. Thus, a leading member of the pro-government peasant youth group argued against the revival of folk costumes – a common trend amongst rural activists – on the grounds that many of them had originated as liveries imposed on peasants under serfdom.¹¹¹ Meanwhile, a speaker for the association of rural tradesmen aggrandised its task of helping peasants enter commerce, by presenting it as a struggle against the “superstitions” inherited from “the old Common-

 S. Czarnowski, “Podłoże ruchu chłopskiego”, in Eadem, Dzieła (Warsaw, 1956), vol. II, p. 185; G. Lewis, “The Peasantry, Rural Change and Conservative Agrarianism: Lower Austria at the Turn of the Century”, Past & Present, 81/1 (1978), pp. 119 – 143.  This vision reached its most developed form in the interwar writings of Józef Niećko, the national head of Wici. Variants of this vision, however, had been widespread in the peasant movement since its beginning and can ultimately be traced to the Romantic period and the historian Joachim Lelewel (1786 – 1861). A. Lech, Tradycyjna kultura ludowa w programach i działalności polskich związków młodzieży wiejskiej w okresie II Rzeczypospolitej (Łódź, 1978), pp. 61– 67; Jakubowska, Ruch ludowy, p. 65; A. Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (Oxford, 1982), pp. 33 – 34.  E. g., J. Stożek, “Złote klucze”, Wieś (June 1934), p. 8.  Lech, Tradycyjna kultura, p. 76.

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wealth of nobles” according to which only Jews were allowed to engage in trade.¹¹² In all these instances, cultural reformers sought to mobilise anti-seigneurial sentiment as a way of building support for cultural change. However, even as they claimed to be banishing the shadows of serfdom, in another sense they were themselves inventing them. By encouraging others to see the world through the lens of serfdom’s legacies, activists once again reinforced the subjective presence of the past in the present.

VI Conclusion The feudal period endured in peasant mentalities and understandings of the present long after serfdom’s formal abolition. This endurance took many forms. Socioeconomic and experiential continuities between the pre- and post-1848 world ensured that peasants continued to discern the legacies of the past in the present and interpret new events and dangers through the schema of re-enserfment. The intergenerational transmission of the memory of serfdom likely contributed to this schematisation, guaranteeing that serfdom remained a potent source of collective pain, identity and hostility towards social elites. What is more, in crucial ways the arrival of modern mass politics entrenched its cultural salience. For political entrepreneurs, anti-seigneurial language became an attractive weapon of rhetorical delegitimization in the battle for peasant support. In the process, they tapped into and perhaps perpetuated peasant neuroses about re-enserfment. It is of course true, as many historians have shown, that these neuroses were significantly diminished by the spread of Polish peasant nationalism.¹¹³ Peasant nationalism, however, also constructed narrative frames that presupposed, however implicitly, the continued existence and strength of a (post‐)feudal antagonist. The Polish peasant movement, one of the main agents of national awakening in the West Galician countryside, also did much to enhance the salience of the memory of serfdom, by encouraging peasants to imagine themselves as part of a larger historical struggle against peasant oppression. As the movement radicalised in the 1930s, the historical interest in serfdom and the perception of its relevance to the interwar present intensified amongst many educated and politically  Kupiec Wiejski (15 July 1939), p. 1. This was not an ideal entirely shared by the peasant movement which, by the late 1930s, generally favoured the cooperativisation of trade rather than the multiplication of peasant traders as a way of wresting control of commerce from the Jews for the popular (non-Jewish) classes.  The effect of Ukrainian nationalism on these fears has not, to my knowledge, been studied.

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engaged peasants, the very group that was least susceptible to rumours of re-enserfment. Thus, even as political modernisation helped defuse fears of re-enserfment, in other ways it narrowed the subjective distance between the premodern past and the modern present. By way of speculative conclusion, it bears mentioning that the resilience of a feudal imaginary is unlikely to be a problem for the periodization of Polish history alone. 19th-century rural France has also been characterised as a place plagued by neuroses about the possible return of feudalism.¹¹⁴ Anti-seigneurial tropes would also be amongst the rhetorical weapons unleashed against the Popular Front government’s plans for a national Wheat Office in 1936.¹¹⁵ In my own studies of interwar politics in thoroughly industrialised Bohemia, I too have found an abundance of anti-feudal rhetoric. Meanwhile, in 1930s Italy, Antonio Gramsci lamented the persistence of what he called the “‘generic’ hatred […] ‘semi-feudal’ rather than modern in character” reserved by many Italians for the vague category of people referred to as i signori. ¹¹⁶ Most recently, the Polish anthropologist Anna Engelking has described how the basic mental categories of lord, Jew and peasant survived in the world of the Belarusian kolkhoz despite the revolutionary changes wrought by Nazi and Soviet rule.¹¹⁷ In short, whilst the story recounted here may be easier to tell for an enduringly agrarian country such as Poland, feudal echoes are likely to lurk in much of modern European history. To be heard, it only takes for historians to listen.

 J.Q.C. Mackrell, The Attack on “Feudalism” in Eighteenth-Century France (London/Toronto, 1973), pp. 186 – 187.  G. Wright, Rural Revolution in France: The Peasantry in the Twentieth Century (Stanford/London, 1964), p. 62.  A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (London/New York, 1971), p. 272.  A. Engelking, “Between the Lord and the Jew: Some Remarks on the Identity Structure of Belarusian Kolkhozniks in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries”, Acta Poloniae Historica, 109 (2014), pp. 81– 108.

Aaron Clift

Chapter 3 L’homme au couteau entre les dents and Les classes dangereuses: A “Transwar” Perspective on Continuities in French Anticommunist Discourse In the years following the Second World War, French politics saw a succession of controversies that hinged on the supposed threat presented by the Parti communiste français (PCF). That anticommunism should become so strong in France at this time is not in itself particularly surprising. The PCF emerged from the war with immense prestige as the parti des fusillés, the preeminent representative of the Resistance against Nazi occupation.¹ At the 21 October 1945 elections, the Communists became the largest single party for the first time.² Such a party, commanding the allegiance of roughly a quarter of the population, could not be easily ignored. However, anticommunism became more than an incidental response to the electoral success of the PCF. Rather, it became the new organising principle for the French Right: its source of unity, chief recruitment tool, and ideological bedrock. As in much of the Western world, anticommunism became the key weapon in the arsenal of the French Right. In this chapter, I will discuss continuities in anticommunist discourses connecting the post-Second World War period with earlier decades. In so doing, I challenge the dominant periodization scheme in French historiography, where the Second World War appears as a decisive caesura separating two periods: l’entre-deux-guerres, the interwar period, with connotations of political turmoil and national decline; and, les trente glorieuses, the “thirty glorious years” of the postwar era. In this traditional approach, 1945’s status as a period break is further enhanced by its alignment with the change between the Third and Fourth Republics – French political history being usually subject to a fairly rigid scheme of periodization between distinct regimes, including the country’s five numbered Republics. In this scheme, the adoption of a new constitution, as in 1946 and 1958, inaugurates a new Republic, and therefore, supposedly, a totally new po-

 D. Lejeune, La peur du “rouge” en France: des partageux aux gauchistes (Paris, 2003), pp. 190 – 191.  Ibid., p. 190. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636000-004

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litical era.³ However, in this chapter I will argue that the application of a similar periodization scheme to anticommunism in France has proved overly simplistic, obscuring the existence of important continuities across different political regimes. My emphasis on continuity between the pre-1939 and post-1945 periods situates this case study within the emergent historiography of the “transwar”. This school of thought, which began with historians studying twentieth-century Japan, rejects the dominant periodization of “prewar”, “postwar”, and “interwar”, and instead, in the words of one its proponents, “puts in the foreground the presence of continuity across the divide of war”. This does not mean “the carrying forward of an unchanging configuration”, but rather highlights a “recurring dynamic of change” which is either continuous or has its own rhythm rather than lining up neatly with war-related historical markers.⁴ There is an increasing tendency in European historiography (whether using the term or not) to examine the “transwar” as well, and this chapter is aligned with this approach.⁵ An approach that regards 1945 as a decisive break in the history of French anticommunism is at risk of exaggerating the special significance of the Cold War.⁶ This tendency is not surprising: it was, of course, the global confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that brought anticommunism to the centre of global politics. Nevertheless, such a perspective has serious limitations. Works that view anticommunism purely through the lens of the Cold War often relegate domestic politics to a supporting role. However, in France anticommunism was as much about internal politics as about foreign policy. According to Richard Vinen, in France, the Cold War was “a national conflict that had begun in 1941, rather than an international conflict that began in 1947”.⁷ In fact, the discourses that I will discuss in this paper stretch back further than 1941. By regarding anticommunism as only the domestic corollary of global tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cold War-centred ap-

 Though even this is not applied consistently: the First Republic went through four constitutions, arguably making the current Republic the Eighth, not the Fifth.  A. Gordon, “Consumption, Leisure and the Middle Class in Transwar Japan”, Social Science Japan Journal, 10/1 (2007), p. 3.  For example: P. Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton, 2012).  For example: I. M. Wall, L’Influence américaine sur la politique française, 1945 – 1954, trans. Philippe-Étienne Raviart (Paris, 1989); P. Grosser, “L’entrée de la France en Guerre Froide”, in S. Berstein and P. Milza (eds), L’année 1947 (Paris, 1999), pp. 177– 178; A. Brogi, A Question of Self-Esteem: The United States and the Cold War Choices in France and Italy, 1944 – 1958 (London, 2002); A. Brogi, Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy, New Cold War History (Chapel Hill, 2011).  R. Vinen, Bourgeois Politics in France, 1945 – 1951 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 23.

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proach can make it seem like anticommunism was an American import. Against this, however, Serge Berstein and Jean-Jacques Becker have shown how anticommunism had a long history in France, dating back to the Bolshevik revolution at the latest, and likely much earlier.⁸ Up to 1924, France was the preeminent power pushing foreign intervention to depose the Bolsheviks. After the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, the Communist Party was even prohibited, with many members imprisoned. Some French political and military leaders enthusiastically supported initiatives to aid Finland in the Winter War and to bomb Caucasian oil fields even as they hesitated to launch offensives against Germany.⁹ Anticommunist groups in post-war France were thus able to draw on a strong indigenous tradition of opposition to Soviet-style communism and to revolutionary leftist politics in general, a tradition that had concerns and discourses which were quite different than American anticommunism. The French state was quite capable of acting against Communism without being pushed by the United States. For example, the French premier Ramadier’s dismissal of his PCF coalition partners in May 1947 was for a long time believed to have resulted from diplomatic pressure from the US, but recent historiography has shown that in fact he made the decision independently.¹⁰ To illustrate the continuities between pre- and post-war anticommunism, I want to focus on a particular mode of anticommunist discourse. This is the critique of communism as anarchic, or anti-social, which is perhaps best represented through the famous image of l’homme au couteau entre les dents: the man with the knife between his teeth. Previous works on anticommunism have described this trope or image as important in the late 19th and early 20th century, when it was first used as a critique of anarchism, before becoming associated with the Bolsheviks after 1917. However, they have tended to see it as something that faded away at later dates, superseded by a depiction of communism that is more familiar to us, that of the anti-totalitarian critique. For example, Berstein and Becker identify the period from 1917 to 1921 in their history of anticommun J.-J. Becker and S. Berstein, Histoire de l’anticommunisme, tome 1, 1917 – 1940 (Paris, 1987). Other works on anticommunism in the interwar period include F. Girod, L’anticommunisme de l’opinion publique française face aux campagnes antimilitaristes du Parti communiste (1923 – 1925) (Paris, 1985); C. Barlier, L’anticommunisme dans la presse: L’Action française et Le Figaro (juin 1936–juin 1937) (Paris, 1985).  Becker and Berstein, Histoire de l’anticommunisme, pp. 43 – 44, 364, 371– 380; G. Rossi-Landi, La drôle de guerre (La vie politique en France, 2 septembre 1939 – 10 mai 1940) (Paris, 1971); J.-P. Azéma, A. Prost, and J.-P. Rioux, Le Parti communiste français des années sombres 1938 – 1941: actes du colloque (Paris, 1986); J.-P. Azéma, A. Prost, and J.-P. Rioux, Les Communistes français de Munich à Châteaubriant: 1938 – 1941 (Paris, 1987).  Lejeune, La peur du “rouge” en France, p. 197.

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ism as the time of the man with the knife between his teeth. After 1921, however, they argue that with the consolidation of the Soviet state and the realization of its authoritarian character, criticism of communism moved in different directions.¹¹ Anarchy was replaced by tyranny as the dominant perception of communism. The new image of the communist would be the jack-booted NKVD agent, rather than the wild-eyed quasi-anarchist madman. Of course, there is no necessary contradiction between these two discourses: an ideology could be seen as both anti-social and totalitarian. However, they do represent rather different points of emphasis, and distinct mental images. Perhaps most importantly, they locate the threat of communism as coming from quite different quarters. The anti-totalitarian critique is first and foremost an anti-Soviet discourse, based on an evaluation of conditions in what was until the Second World War the only example of “actually existing socialism”. In this anti-Soviet discourse, domestic communists were seen as dangerous in that they represented a foreign element within the nation. One thinks of the discourses of the early Cold War United States, the era of McCarthyism, in which communism was imagined as a monolith directed from Moscow, an essentially foreign threat.¹² As Berstein and Becker note, in France nationalist anticommunism was not just anti-Soviet but anti-German: the Bolshevik takeover was initially portrayed as a German scheme to get Russia out of the war (which is partially true), and this theme reappeared later on, for instance when the communists opposed the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, or after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939.¹³ By contrast, the man with the knife between his teeth locates the threat from communism in what 19th-century commentators called the classes dangereuses, the poor and working-class masses who supposedly threatened the proper foundations of society with their wild, amoral, and politically radical behaviour – an essentially domestic threat, and indeed one that long predates the creation of the Soviet Union. Further casting doubt on the portrayal of post-1945 anticommun-

 Becker and Berstein, Histoire de l’anticommunisme, pp. 124– 126.  For example: L. Ceplair, Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History (Santa Barbara, 2011); R. J. Goldstein, Little “red Scares”: Anti-Communism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921 – 1946 (Farnham, 2014); T. G. Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (Oxford, 1989); R. M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford, 1990); D. Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York, 1978); P. L. Steinberg, The great “Red Menace”: United States Prosecution of American Communists, 1947 – 1952 (Westport, 1984); M. P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917 – 1953 (New York, 1994).  Becker and Berstein, Histoire de l’anticommunisme, pp. 21– 23, 30, 162– 170, 342– 345.

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ism as an American import, this focus on communism as a lower-class phenomenon also distances it from the American version, where McCarthy directed his rhetoric against a real or perceived elite, declaring in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia where he launched his anticommunist campaign that “the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been most traitorous”.¹⁴ This divergence is doubly interesting given that communist beliefs, unlike in the United States, actually were prevalent in the French intellectual elite.¹⁵ I will argue that the reason past historians of the subject have failed to notice the persistence of this second discourse, the anti-social as opposed to the antitotalitarian, beyond the early the 1920s, lies in the strong tendency of earlier historiography of anticommunism to focus only on the upper echelons of society, especially on intellectuals. To return to Becker and Berstein, their history of anticommunism in the interwar period is based purely on the opinions of politicians, political parties, and the press. Indeed, it is the totalitarian image of communism, represented by the tyrannical, monolithic Soviet state, that predominates in the works of anticommunist intellectuals like Raymond Aron, the contributors to The God that Failed, or the later “anti-totalitarian movement” of the 1970s.¹⁶ However, when one looks at the anticommunism of less prominent figures and those lower in the social scale, the persistence of this different image can be seen more clearly. For these individuals, political fears about communism were deeply intertwined with social fears about workers and the lower classes in general, and indeed with racial fears, both in the empire and at home. Importantly, when these people expressed anxiety about communism, they were expressing fears not about the Soviet Union, but about their fellow French citizens. They demonstrated a particular concern with the idea that communism was promoting or reflecting the innate immorality of the groups in question. These fears were also tied to place: the threat was clearly located in specific urban spaces, such as working-class neighbourhoods in the banlieues of Paris. This chapter will demonstrate the persistence of all these elements – social fear, moralism, anti-urbanism – and their intertwining through various epochs of French history, thereby demonstrating the utility of social history in challenging traditional periodization themes founded in a focus on top-down, political and intellectual history.  R. Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (Amherst, 1987), p. 330.  T. Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944 – 1956 (Berkeley, 1992).  R. Aron, L’opium des intellectuels (Paris, 1955); R. Crossman and A. Koestler (eds), The God That Failed (New York, 1954); M. S. Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (Oxford, 2004).

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While it would be interesting to see if the persistence of anti-social themes is true of anticommunism in other countries as well, there are reasons to believe that this continuity would have been particularly acute in France. As has been previously mentioned, the Communist Party was a large political force in France in this period, claiming around a quarter of the vote, and thus presented an imminent domestic threat. Furthermore, the French were throughout the immediate post-war period less anti-Soviet than other Western countries. If anything, association with the USSR probably helped the PCF, as the French population widely perceived the Soviets as the country that had fought the hardest and sacrificed the most to secure the defeat of fascism (with 57 % of those asked in a 1945 poll giving the USSR the primary credit for the defeat of Germany), and this brought with it immense prestige.¹⁷ One might object to the argument of this chapter that the mere appearance of similar social fears at different points in history does not in itself constitute evidence of continuity. Different actors could conceivably have expressed similar feelings independently of one another. This concern could apply to many discussions of historical continuity: how is one to differentiate between true continuity and mere similarity, in the absence of evidence of direct inspiration? I have no ambition to provide a definitive answer to this question, but it is my hope that this article will demonstrate the existence and persistence of a number of distinct tropes or images whose use was unlikely to be mere coincidence. These include a depiction of workers as savages or wild animals; a conflation of politically undesirable ideologies with socially undesirable groups and morally undesirable behaviours, particularly concerning sexuality; and a situation of these concerns in particular urban spaces. This is not to say that were no divergences in how the discourses appeared at different times – they were always modified in response to the particular concerns of specific periods or actors. These contrasting emphases have been mentioned when appropriate. However, the core of the anti-social discourse as described above remained.

 Institut Français d’Opinion Publique, “Sondage 06.06. 2014: Les Français et le soixante-dixième anniversaire du débarquement de Normandie”, http://www.ifop.com/?option=com_pub lication&type=poll&id=2684 (accessed 5 June 2018).

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I The discourse of anti-social communism in French history I will now offer a brief overview of the history of this discourse in France, from what Dominique Lejeune has referred to as an “anti-communisme avant le communisme”, in the 19th century, through the First World War and the emergence of the Soviet Union, into the interwar period, and then through the Second World War into the early years of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s.¹⁸ Throughout the 19th century, fears about the classes dangereuses, the impoverished and working-class residents of the expanding industrial cities, were commonly expressed. Historians such as Dominique Lejeune, Louis Chevalier, Thomas R. Forstenzer, and John Merriman have noted the importance of these sorts of ‘social fears” for French politics during the 19th century.¹⁹ Visions of a dangerous and debauched lower class are apparent throughout modern French history. Jean Neuville has described how the working class passed from being the classe objet to being the classe suspect over the course of 19th century.²⁰ Memories of the sans-culottes of the Reign of Terror kept alive a vision of what would happen if social order broke down and the lower classes were allowed to wreak their vengeance on the higher.²¹ Before Marx had even penned his manifesto, communism was indeed already haunting Europe like a spectre. Two episodes in particular highlight this: these are the June Days of 1848, and of course the Paris Commune. In both cases, perceived risings of the classes dangereuses brought a furious response from the rest of society, resulting in massacres.²² Throughout the remainder of the century, stories about the depredations inflicted by the petroleuses, the female Communards, on their betters were grist for the mill of the anti-socialist press and of right-wing political movements.²³ Joan Scott has highlighted the particular threat to social order that fe-

 Lejeune, La peur du “rouge” en France, p. 138.  Lejeune, La peur du “rouge” en France; L. Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle. (Paris, 1958); T. R. Forstenzer, French Provincial Police and the Fall of the Second Republic: Social Fear and Counterrevolution (Princeton, 1981); J. M. Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871 (New Haven, 2014).  J. Neuville, La Condition ouvrière au XIXe siècle, L’ouvrier objet (Brussels, 1976); J. Neuville, La Condition ouvrière au XIXe siècle, L’ouvrier suspect, (Brussels, 1977).  Lejeune, La peur du “rouge” en France, pp. 17– 20.  Ibid., pp. 28 – 30, 66; Forstenzer, French Provincial Police and the Fall of the Second Republic; Merriman, Massacre.  Lejeune, La peur du “rouge” en France, p. 68.

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male workers were seen to represent.²⁴ Gender also played a major role in another fear, that of communisme sexuel, the supposedly debauched nature of the communist militant who would seek to “collectivise” bourgeois women.²⁵ In response to these fears, the French state erected a legal infrastructure designed to counter these supposed threats from below, which would later be put to use against communism. For example, in 1952, when the French government was trying to find some way to prosecute André Stil, the editor of the Communist Party newspaper l’Humanité, it reached back to a law of June 1848 in order to imprison the journalist for the crime of “provoking crowds”.²⁶ At the end of the 19th century, anarchist terrorism or propaganda of the deed led to the creation of the man with the knife between his teeth as a representative of the folk image of the anarchist radical: wild-eyed, dishevelled, dangerously insane, potentially French but also potentially an immigrant, especially from Eastern Europe, maybe Jewish, but certainly beyond the pale of respectable society.²⁷ Works of both non-fiction, like Felix Dubois’ conspiratorial Le Péril anarchiste of 1894, and fiction, like Emile Zola’s Paris of 1898, demonstrate fears about the anarchist threat to civilisation.²⁸ Thus, when the October Revolution occurred in 1917, French anticommunists could draw on ready-made images to use against the new threat. This can be seen in the appearance of the man with the knife between his teeth, shown (Fig. 1) on the cover of anti-Bolshevik pamphlet published during the 1919 election campaigns, Comment voter contre le Bolshevisme?. ²⁹ This was just one of many such pamphlets published during this election campaign.³⁰ The 1919 elections were in many ways a first peak of French anticommunist agitation: there

 J. Scott, The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a NineteenthCentury City (Cambridge, 1974).  Ibid., p. 74.  M. Pigenet, Au Coeur de l’Activisme Communiste des Années de Guerre Froide: “La manifestation Ridgway” (Paris, 1992), p. 21.  Lejeune, La peur du “rouge” en France, pp. 105 – 110; J. Moulaert, “La peur du rouge et noir. La genèse du péril anarchiste en Belgique”, in P. Delwit and J. Gotovitch (eds), La peur du rouge, (Brussels, 1996).  F. Dubois, Le Péril Anarchiste (Paris, 1894); É. Zola, Paris (Paris, 1898).  Comment voter contre le bolchevisme (Fontenay-aux-Roses, 1919); Becker and Berstein, Histoire de l’anticommunisme, pp. 29 – 30; C. Pennetier, “La peur blanche des banlieues rouges en France”, in P. Delwit and J. Gotovitch (eds), La peur du rouge, (Brussels, 1996).  Becker and Berstein, Histoire de l’anticommunisme, p. 32. Titles included: Le Bolchevisme, arme de guerre de l’Allemagne; Bolchevisme et Misère; Les Bolcheviks, ennemis de la démocratie; Bolchevisme et Judaïsme; Soyez maudits, bolcheviks!; Ce que Marcel Cachin cache; Contre la tyrannie bolcheviste en Russie; Pas de bolchevisme, gagnons la paix!, etc.

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was a strong movement for intervention in the Russian Civil War, and widespread revulsion against Bolshevism was in part what led to a massive rightwing victory.³¹

Fig. 1: Cover of a pamphlet, Comment voter contre le bolchevisme (Fontenay-aux-Roses : impr. de Louis Bellenand, 1919). Illustration by Adrien Barrière. © Collections La Contemporaine.

As previously mentioned, it is at this point, with the consolidation of communist control over the Soviet Union and the emergence of an authoritarian or totalitarian regime there, that most narratives see a shift away from this discourse to that of anti-totalitarianism. However, fears about communism as a new expression of the classes dangereuses are apparent in many interwar publications. Pierre Lhande, a Catholic priest and an important evangelist in 1920s and 1930s, can  Ibid., pp. 32– 53.

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serve as a representative and influential example. Lhande was a Jesuit from the Basque country.³² Prior to the 1920s, his work had been primarily concerned with Basque cultural issues, including the publication of a Basque-French dictionary.³³ He was an innovator in the field of Catholic evangelism in France as one of the first priests to deliver sermons over the radio: these broadcasts, which occurred in the later 1920s and early 1930s, were extremely popular.³⁴ However, the dimension of his life that is most relevant here is his work in and on the workingclass suburbs of Paris. These activities were more or less a direct response to the growth of the PCF in these areas. While in the 1920s the PCF had yet to attain the widespread national success that would follow its adoption of a Popular Front strategy after 1934 and even more after the Second World War, it nevertheless had experienced strong growth in the working-class suburbs of Paris. In the elections of 1924, the party had received 26 % of the vote in the Paris region, and by 1925 had already taken control of 8 municipal governments, all in the banlieues populaires to the north and east of Paris, the area which in time would come to be known as the ceinture rouge. ³⁵ This only added to existing Catholic anxieties about the lack of religion in these “dechristianised” areas.³⁶ Lhande clearly expressed these fears in his ethnographic work on Le Christ dans la banlieue : enquête sur la vie religieuse dans les milieux ouvriers de la banlieue de Paris. ³⁷ This work attained great success and influence going through multiple editions throughout the remainder of the 1930s, and even in 1941 being adapted into a motion picture (Notre-Dame de la Mouise). Lhande’s views and methods were in many ways paradoxical. Emile Poulat, a “worker-priest” in these same areas, characterised Lhande as a conservative ideologue longing for an Arcadian utopia. But Lhande could also be strikingly modern, as is indicated by his pioneering use of radio to appeal to workers alienated from the Church. This paradox is clearly displayed in his description of the banlieues of Paris: on the one hand, reflecting the contempt felt by many on the right, especially those from the more traditionalist provinces, for the workingclasses of the capital city, on the other displaying the concern of the social Cath-

 J. Moret, Le père Lhande, pionnier du Christ dans la banlieue et à la radio (Paris, 1964), p. 13.  Ibid., p. 63.  Ibid., p. 119.  S. B. Whitney, Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Durham, 2009), p. 82.  Ibid.  Christ in the suburbs: enquiry into religious life in the workers’ milieus of the suburbs of Paris, published in three volumes in 1927, 1930, and 1931 respectively.

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olic for their spiritual and material salvation and the reform of the Church to better appeal to them. The work Le Christ dans la banlieue was based on Lhande’s travels from 1924 to 1930 through the banlieues of Paris, visiting Catholic clerics and interviewing them on the religious, social, and political life of these areas. During this period, by his own calculations he visited 52 churches or chapels; 90 charitable foundations; 40 clinics; 12 schools; 8 kindergartens; 14 nurseries; and 80 other Church properties.³⁸ There he discovered what he termed a “désert spirituel”.³⁹ In Bobigny, which Lhande described both as a “Babylone” and as France’s Moscow, there were only 210 baptisms and 150 practicing Catholics in a population of between 15,000 and 18,000.⁴⁰ The situation in other banlieues such as Ivry (no longer Ivry-sur-Seine, but now “Ivry-la-Rouge”, “Ivry-la-Communiste”) and Clichy was little better.⁴¹ True religion had been replaced by the “pseudo-religion communiste”. Lhande’s portrayal of communists was animalistic. He described the “the almost complete amorality” of the banlieues: besides their political leanings, promiscuity, alcoholism, gambling, and other vices were rampant.⁴² He directly connected these moral concerns to the question of communism, describing communist rallies as “orgies” and likening them to “savage”, pagan religious rites.⁴³ Indeed, Lhande often seemed to conflate communists and poor residents of the areas he studied; they are referred to almost interchangeably, in an ironic echo of the PCF’s own self-portrayal as the “party of the proletariat”. Lhande carried the comparison of communist rallies to pagan rituals further, recommending that Catholic missionaries in these areas adopt the tactics used in the “pays barbares” (barbarous countries) of France’s colonies.⁴⁴ Indeed, comparisons with “uncivilised” non-European locales are frequent in Lhande’s description of the banlieues. He said the southern suburbs of Paris evoked a “long Indian village running endlessly on the road to Orléans. Outside of the city, it looks like the bush, the naked and dusty Orient close to the Boulevard…here one world ends and another begins.”⁴⁵ He also called the area the “ceinture noire” (black belt), for its racial character, playing on its common des-

       

Moret, Le père Lhande, p. 112. Ibid., p. 95. Lhande, Le Christ dans la banlieue, p. 65. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 11; Whitney, Mobilizing Youth, p. 83. Lhande, Le Christ dans la banlieue, p. 65. Ibid., p. 34 Ibid., p. 21.

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ignation as a “ceinture rouge” (red belt) in reflection of its political affiliations. In this he echoed the sociologist Eugène Buret in his La misère des classes laborieuses en France et en Angleterre who, almost one hundred years earlier (in 1840), described “points of likeness between the poor man and the savage”, including a supposed propensity to drunkenness: Savages alone take to drink with the fervour displayed by the most degraded part of the poor classes, like the Negro on the African coast, who sells his children and himself for a bottle of spirits…To the savage, intoxication is supreme felicity; to the destitute of the great cities it is an invincible passion, an indulgence which they cannot do without and purchase regardless of its price at the expense of health and life itself…What a depressing picture this is, these people who are our compatriots and brothers deliberately plunging into the most bestial inebriety, of malice aforethought, inoculating themselves with the ferocity of wild beasts by means of alcohol, and indulging in ignoble orgies, with their accompaniment of brawls and blood!⁴⁶

These sorts of descriptions had a wide cultural reach. Balzac, too, had frequently characterized workers as savages in his series of novels and stories of social observation, the Comédie humaine: for instance, in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, he wrote “Theirs is, in short, the nature of wild animals”.⁴⁷ While there is no doubt that alcoholism, gambling, and prostitution were prevalent in workingclass neighborhoods both in the 19th century and the interwar period, commentators like Lhande and Buret went farther than merely observing these social realities when they likened their subjects to savages and beasts. The connection drawn between the poor and “uncivilised” peoples was thus an enduring one. Lhande also linked these concerns to fears about immigration: these were areas, Lhande wrote, where Paris dumped “her undesirables, her Turks, her Serbs, her Czechoslovaks, her Arabs”.⁴⁸ This also was not new, as is apparent in reading Balzac’s description of the Parisian neighbourhood of Little Poland in La cousine Bette (1846). Thus in Lhande we see a mixing of social, political, moral and racial fears that was characteristic of conservative discourses around the classes dangereuses.

 E. Buret, De la Misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France : de la nature de la misère, de son existence, de ses effets, de ses causes, et de l’insuffisance des remèdes qu’on lui a opposés jusqu’ici, avec les moyens propres à en affranchir les sociétés (2 vols, Paris, 1840), vol. II, pp. 2, 14; as translated in L. Chevalier, Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1973), pp. 359 – 360.  H. de Balzac, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (Paris, 1838), p. 472; as translated in Chevalier, Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes, p. 392.  Lhande, Le Christ dans la banlieue, p. 34.

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Fig. 2: Illustration by H. Petit in Le Flambeau, a newspaper. © Collections La Contemporaine.

Lhande is not the only example of the persistence of the anti-social image of communism in interwar France. A second sort of peak in French anticommunist agitation can be seen after the victory of the Popular Front in the elections of 1936.⁴⁹ As in 1919, in 1936 – 7 there was a flurry of publications purporting to reveal the “truth” about communism: Les Soviets contre la France (1936); J’accuse Moscou (1937); Le Chaos espagnol (1937); Staline contre l’Europe (1937), etc.⁵⁰ The man with the knife between his teeth also reappeared, for instance in Le Flambeau (Fig. 2), the newspaper of the fiercely anticommunist veterans’ organisation Croix-de-Feu, the most successful radical right movement in 1930s France; this time Stalin was placed in the starring role.⁵¹ Before the Popular Front’s victory, Paul Morand’s Je brûle Moscou had also combined earlier anti-social imagery with the new focus on the USSR. Morand was primarily focused on the foreign, Soviet nature of the communist threat, something generally associated with the anti-totalitarian critique, but his description of Moscow draws heavily on the ear-

 Becker and Berstein, Histoire de l’anticommunisme, pp. 264, 280 – 316.  Ibid., p. 264.  Ibid., pp. 271– 275; G. A. Howlett, “The Croix de Feu, the Parti Social Français and Colonel de La Rocque” (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1985); S. Kennedy, Reconciling France against Democracy: The Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français, 1927 – 1945 (Montréal, 2007); S. Kalman, The Extreme Right in Interwar France: The Faisceau and the Croix de Feu (Aldershot, 2008).

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lier images, with the city portrayed as an anarchic, unhygienic swamp of degeneracy and immorality.⁵²

Fig. 3: François Coty, Contre le communisme, Sauvons nos colonies © Bernard Grasset, 1931.

A particular concern for many in France was the perceived communist threat to the country’s colonial empire. This was clearly expressed by one of the country’s most influential colonial policy-makers, Albert Sarraut, who, during one of his many stints as Minister of Colonies, gave a speech in Constantine, Algeria in 1927 in which he argued that colonial rebellions against imperial authority were the work of communist agents (and not, of course, the native populations, who, he said, were sincere in their love for France). He declared: “le communisme, voilà l’ennemi!”⁵³ Indeed, this fiction, that resistance to France’s empire was purely of communist inspiration and the work of a few agitators alien to the colonised populations, would reappear whenever there was a disturbance in any  P. Morand, Je brûle Moscou (Paris, 1934). Originally published in serialised form in 1925.  Quoted in Becker and Berstein, Histoire de l’anticommunisme, p. 188 – 189.

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of France’s colonies – causing French authorities to dangerously underestimate their adversaries in later conflicts in Indochina and Algeria.⁵⁴ Fears about the communist threat to the French Empire were also apparent in the propaganda of François Coty, one of France’s most devoted anticommunists in the interwar period (Fig. 3). The successful perfume manufacturer spent a considerable proportion of his personal fortune supporting various anticommunist causes, including three newspapers, a book (1928’s Contre le communisme) and a number of far-right political movements including Croix-de-Feu, Le Faisceau, and his own Solidarité Française. ⁵⁵ As Fig. 3 demonstrates, the man with the knife between his teeth merged with existing racialized imagery to form a composite image which conflated the threat from communism with the threat represented by non-white peoples. The communist critique of colonialism was thus transformed into another terrifying demonstration of its overturning of traditional hierarchies, be they social or racial. This interacted with the developing Occidentalisme of works like Défense de l’Occident (1927) by the Action française writer Henri Massis and Orient et Occident (1924) by the Orientalist René Guénon, which centred the notion of “the West” and twinned or conflated the threats of communism and of the uprising of colonial peoples, whether black Africans as in Fig. 3 or east Asians (the “yellow peril”).⁵⁶ By this point, however, the image had become so engrained in the French political consciousness that the Communists themselves started to acknowledge it, and indeed to consciously play upon it. Fig. 4 presents their attempt to turn the image back onto their opponents, with Hitler as the man with the knife between his teeth, also from the 1936 election campaign. Fig. 5 represents a more tongue-in-cheek (or knife in cheek) usage: a group of communists and their families proudly displaying their daggers between their teeth. Unsurprisingly, the extensive anticommunist propaganda of the Vichy regime reproduced images of this sort during the Second World War. The racial dimensions of fear of communism, and the connections between it and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, portrayed as the impure residents of squalid shtetls

 M. S. Alexander, M. Evans, and J. F. V. Keiger, “The ‘War without a Name’, the French Army and the Algerians: Recovering Experiences, Images and Testimonies”, in M. S. Alexander, M. Evans, and J. Keiger (eds), The Algerian War and the French Army, 1954 – 1962: Experiences, Images, Testimonies (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), p. 22.  Becker and Berstein, Histoire de l’anticommunisme, p. 119 – 123.  H. Massis, Défense de l’Occident (Paris, 1927); R. Guénon, Orient et Occident (Paris, 1924); S. Federici, “The God That Never Failed: The Origins and Crises of Western Civilization”, in S. Federici (ed), Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its “Others” (London, 1995), p. 67.

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Fig. 4: Poster by Raoul Cabrol, 1936. © ADAGP, © Collections La Contemporaine.

and ghettos, often though not always implicit in pre-war propaganda, were now made central and explicit in the discourses of the Vichy regime.⁵⁷

II A persistent image in post-WW2 France After the Second World War, the anti-totalitarian critique became more prominent. This can be seen clearly in the discourse of the largest anticommunist propaganda group in France, Paix et Liberté, which had been founded in 1950 as a mixed state-private organisation by the Minister of Defense René Pleven and was presided over by a Radical Party member of parliament, Jean-Paul David.⁵⁸ Paix et Liberté would eventually expand beyond France, moving into other European countries, with financial aid from the CIA, in 1951, and eventually outside Europe, to Indochina, as well.⁵⁹ As can be seen in Fig. 6, a major focus of Paix et Liberté was drawing equivalencies between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The threat of communism was located externally, in the So-

 L. Gervereau and D. Peschanski, La Propagande sous Vichy, 1940 – 1944 (Nanterre, 1990).  B. Ludwig, “Paix et liberté: A Transnational Anti-Communist Network”, in L. van Dongen, S. Roulin, and G. Scott-Smith (eds), Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities, and Networks (Basingstoke, 2014), p. 82.  Ibid., pp. 84– 86.

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Fig. 5: Cover of Philippe Buton and Laurent Gervereau, Le Couteau entre les dents : 70 ans d’affiches communistes et anticommunistes (Paris : Chêne, 1989), © Leonard de Selva / Bridgeman Images.

viet Union, whose totalitarian system was seen to pose an existential threat to the West.

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Fig. 6: Poster by Paix et liberté, 1950. © Archives Larbor.

However, in my view, a perspective which sees this as a decisive rupture with the past, rather than as the introduction of a new discourse that nevertheless coexisted with older ones, is misguided.⁶⁰ If the emphasis of anticommunist discourses shifted at the elite level, when one looks further down the social scale, at the anticommunism of the ordinary French citizen in their organisational life, one finds a strong persistence of the earlier discourses, to a greater extent than the new anti-totalitarian ones that so concerned intellectuals. By way of a case study, this can be seen through examining a particular youth movement in postwar France, the scouts. The scouts were the largest youth organisation in France: in 1959, a poll revealed that 1 in 10 French youth was or had been

 This view is represented in Becker and Berstein, Histoire de l’anticommunisme; Lejeune, La peur du “rouge” en France; Ludwig, “Paix et liberté”; Vinen, Bourgeois Politics in France; and, the works cited in footnote 3.

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a member of a scouting organisation.⁶¹ In France, there were six different scouting organisations, separated from one another by religion. These included four for boys: the Catholic Scouts de France (SDF), founded in 1920; the secular Éclaireurs de France (EDF), the original movement formed in 1911; the Protestant Éclaireurs unionistes (EUF), created in 1912; and, the Jewish Éclaireurs israélites (EIF), established in 1923; as well as two for girls: the Catholic Guides de France (GDF), formed in 1923; and, the Fédération française des éclaireuses (FFE), created in 1921, and bringing together secular, Protestant, and Jewish girls. Relations between the PCF and French scouting had never been good. The Communists in the post-Second World War period were promoting their alternative to the scouts, the Vaillants, and as such launched an attack on scouting with the book La Duperie du Scoutisme in 1947.⁶² The French scouting organisations, in turn, took anticommunist positions. The Catholic GDF and SDF prohibited communists from becoming members. The SDF stated: “The Church has condemned the Marxist doctrine of historical materialism and the excess of statism, that negates the family and the human person. On this plane of the absolute, a scout thus cannot adhere to the communist party.”⁶³ The anticommunism of French scouting demonstrates significant continuities with the anti-social image of communism represented by the man with the knife between his teeth. Le Chef, the journal for the troop leaders of the Scouts de France, the Catholic scouting organisation, wrote: “Bolshevism is a liberty without restraint, a ferment of individualism, dissolving the bonds of a community regulated by natural right manifesting divine principles…an abomination”.⁶⁴ This characterisation of Soviet communism as excessively libertarian or individualist certainly sounds strange to our ears, much more used to the totalitarian portrayal of the Soviet system, but it was a prominent one in anticommunist discourses in France in the post-war period, especially in communities and organisations like Scouts de France which were influenced by the more conservative sorts of Catholic ideology. This sort of anticommunist rhetoric was closely related to the generally antimodern, anti-urban, anti-industrial strain within the scouting movement, which echoed the earlier anticommunist discourses discussed above. From Baden-Powell onwards, scouting had emphasized the importance of education en plein

 J.-J. Gauthé, Le scoutisme en France: inventaire de la bibliographie et des sources (Montpellier, 1997), p. 39.  M. Merville, La Duperie du Scoutisme (Paris, 1947).  “Politique”, Le Chef (March 1945), p. 299.  Cited in C. Guérin, L’utopie scouts de France: histoire d’une identité collective, catholique et sociale, 1920 – 1995 (Paris, 1997), pp. 218 – 219.

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air, that is outdoors, preferably in remote areas in the form of camping trips. Behind this was an ideology that denigrated urban life and exalted the rural. An FFE manual for chieftaines argued: Physically, the city has a disturbing effect on the future of the race. Lucien Romier describes the moral suffering of the townspeople: “What the modern worker, the slave of the factory, the office or the store, suffers from the most, as well as the bourgeois prisoner of his street or his neighbourhood, is a lack of food for his imagination”.⁶⁵

The SDF would also refer negatively to the impurity of “les villes tentaculaires”, particularly to the sexual immorality allegedly prevalent there: children needed to be rescued from the immoral urban environment and returned to the rural world, which was held to be both environmentally and morally pure.⁶⁶ MarcelDenis Forestier, its spiritual head, blamed juvenile delinquency on the urban environment as well, pointing to negative peer pressure, bad neighbourhoods, and the cinema as causes of youth criminality.⁶⁷ The similarities with Lhande’s portrayal of the banlieues are apparent. As with Lhande, this stance was linked directly to anticommunism. A GDF report blamed urbanism and industrialisation for the “disintegration and displacement of moral values”, and argued that communism, with its extreme materialism, was the ultimate expression of these problems.⁶⁸ The prevalence of the anti-social discourse in the French scouting movement is closely related to its bourgeois social character. For instance, a breakdown of the EIF’s membership in Paris by arrondissement reveals that by far the greatest number hailed from the wealthy 16th and 17th arrondissements.⁶⁹ A report on the social background of EUF members from 1947 indicated that the percentage of members from working-class backgrounds varied between 24 and 30 % depending on the branch, well below their proportion in the overall French population (which was closer to 40 %).⁷⁰ The GDF in 1951 was even more unrepresentative, with the percentages of members born to working-class families varying from 9 % among the youngest to a shocking 0 % among the oldest category of mem-

 Manuel de la chieftaine d’éclaireuses, p. 134.  J. Folliet, La Spiritualité de la Route (Paris, 1948), p. 125.  M.-D. Forestier, Scoutisme missionnaire, le chef témoin du Christ (Paris, 1955), pp. 109 – 110.  M. Barrot, “Désintégration et déplacement des valeurs morales”, 10 Sept.1946, Box 421, Fonds Guides de France, Archives Scouts et Guides de France.  “Statistiques des E.I.F. par arrondissement, décembre 1937”, Box CMXLIII/1/1/4, Fonds Éclaireurs israélites de France, Centre de documentation juive contemporaine.  “Rapport moral 1946”, Le Lien, no. rapport (April 1947), pp. 141, 143, 146.

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bers. The largest social categories represented in its membership were the offspring of white-collar employees and of members of the liberal professions.⁷¹ Many within the scouting movement perceived no problem with this. Jean Joussellin of the EUF even celebrated the bourgeois character of scouting, arguing that it had been the historical function of the nobility and then the bourgeoisie to harmonise society. “Our society needs a new bourgeoisie”, he declared, and scouting should aim to appeal to this group in fulfilling its socially-integrating function, not to the masses.⁷² Roger Crapoulet of the EUF, in trying to explain scouting’s lack of success among the proletarian youth, took a Lhandean tack by blaming it on the apathy and hedonism of the workers themselves.⁷³ A cohort of reformers, especially within the EDF, took a different stance, however. These leaders argued that greater changes to scouting were necessary to expand among the working-class. Most especially, they argued the movement needed to take a progressive political stance: working-class youth would only respond to a movement that addressed their material concerns and demands for social justice. This reformist stance, catering to the political concerns of the working-class, opened up the EDF to attack by anticommunists inside and outside the organisation. The most prominent of these was Georges Bertier, co-founder of EDF and its president between 1921 and 1937, who in late 1951 resigned from it in protest at what he saw as the increasing politicisation of the movement.⁷⁴ Over the next year Bertier would make a number of accusations against the EDF in a series of articles and pamphlets, arguing that since 1944 the movement had been infiltrated by communists.⁷⁵ He pointed to a number of articles in EDF journals which, he said, endorsed communism and undermined both France and the scout movement,⁷⁶ alleging that his formers colleagues had adopted “a decided and aggressive communist attitude”.⁷⁷

 A. Reille, “A propos d’une enquête sur le milieu sociologique”, Chieftaines (June 1951), pp. 18 – 22.  J. Joussellin, “Notre place dans le monde”, Le Lien, no. special (Nov.-Dec. 1948), pp. 55 – 58.  R. Crapoulet, “Le Scoutisme en milieu populaire”, Le Lien, no. 10 (Oct. 1945), p. 314– 315.  Ibid.  G. Bertier, “Evolution du Mouvement E.D.F. Depuis 1944”, 1952, Box 542 J/65(4), Fonds Éclaireurs de France, Archives departementales Val-de-Marne.  G. Bertier, “Evolution du mouvement E.D.F. depuis 1948”, 1952, Box 541 J/65(4), Fonds Éclaireurs de France, Archives départementales Val-de-Marne, pp. 6 – 9; G. Bertier, “Evolution du mouvement E.D.F. depuis 1944”, pp. 4– 9.  G. Bertier, “Réponse de M. Bertier à la décision du Scoutisme Français du 31 décembre 1952”, 1952, Box 531 J/6, Fonds Scoutisme Français, Archives départementales Val-de-Marne, p. 4.

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One of Bertier’s most prominent critiques of the EDF, which echoed earlier claims about “sexual communism” and the connections drawn by Lhande and others between communism and “immorality”, was his attack on its experiment with co-education, or mixité as it was referred to within the movement. The EDF had adopted a limited and quite conservative form of co-education in 1948.⁷⁸ Despite its moderate character, this reform was a major departure from previous scouting practice, which had enforced a fairly rigid gender segregation and proclaimed a clear “separate spheres” gender ideology. Consequently, it was fiercely attacked by Bertier as a communist-inspired attack on the family. He accused the EDF of organising mixité with “a dangerous imprudence”.⁷⁹ He made vague allegations of “immoral” behaviour in certain co-educational troops in Lyon and Paris: in the latter case, he was outraged that a troop had taken as a topic of discussion the question “Why do young girls not have the right to have, before marriage, the same experience of love as boys are authorised to have?”⁸⁰ In these attacks, Bertier received sympathy from the other scouting organisations. Mixité, the SDF said, was the product of the dangerous “Marxist idea of the equality of men and women”.⁸¹ The EDF’s policy even received condemnation from the international scouting movement.⁸² Bertier also reflected earlier fears about communism undermining the French empire. The idea of an imperial mission, to train young people for service on the frontier, in the colonies, was central to Baden-Powell’s first conception of scouting, and carried over strongly into the French associations. In his articles alleging communist infiltration, Bertier repeatedly accused the EDF of undermining the Union française in various contexts. He attacked them for referring to Algerian nationalists as “résistants” as if to suggest they were equivalent to the French resistance and thus France equivalent to Nazi Germany.⁸³ He alleged that the EDF’s journals only recorded instances of violence by France against Tunisians, while ignoring violence committed by Tunisians against Frenchmen.⁸⁴ Most of all, he highlighted the EDF’s supposedly unpatriotic lack of commitment to the war in Indochina. He claimed that EDF delegates had participated in a

 Rennes, “La coéducation à la Route: projet de règlement intérieur de la branche”, Cahiers Route no. 14 (1950), pp. 1– 4.  G. Bertier, “Pourquoi nous quittons les Eclaireurs de France”, 1952, Box 531 J/6, Fonds Scoutisme Français, Archives départementales Val-de-Marne, p. 1.  Ibid., p. 5.  P. Roux, “Pourquoi la Route?”, Le Chef no. 242 (Jan. 1948), p. 19.  Kergomard and François, Histoire des Éclaireurs de France, p. 342.  Bertier, “Evolution du mouvement E.D.F. depuis 1948”, p. 11.  Ibid.

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Vietnamese national celebration at the World Youth Festival in communist Budapest in 1948, and that while there they had expressed opposition to the war and said there was growing “rebellion” against it in France.⁸⁵ This, he said, was proof of their “communist convictions”, reflecting the widespread conflation of all anti-colonial sentiment with communism.⁸⁶ The Indochina war, where France faced an anti-colonial rebellion led by a communist movement, unsurprisingly strengthened the earlier associations between the red and yellow perils.⁸⁷ One anticommunist journal described how France’s colonies in the East were “caught between the red push and the yellow invasion”, and even declared their hope that communist electors might be drawn away from the party given the “danger to the whole white race”.⁸⁸ Thus, we can see the continuation of many of the elements of the earlier anti-social discourse about communism in the French scouting movement: fears about the disintegration of social, sexual, racial, and colonial hierarchies were expressed through a virulent anticommunism. Of course, the scouting movement was the not only place these discourses reappeared in the post-war period. Perhaps unsurprisingly, antiurban discourses which denigrated the working-class residents of the banlieues were prominent among anticommunists in France’s lively agricultural politics. In this period, French agriculture was witness to a power struggle between the left (more Socialist than Communist, in reality), which hoped to unite all of France’s agricultural associations under a single umbrella, the Confédération générale de l’agriculture (CGA), and the conservatives of the Fédération nationale des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles (FNSEA) who wished to preserve their autonomy. The latter used anticommunist rhetoric in this struggle. The communist threat to the family also played a part in their rhetoric. La Terre Nouvelle, an anticommunist agricultural periodical, wrote of the “Marxist doctrine on the family”: Conjugal relations must be dominated by love: the union should thus be free et not last any longer than the love…the children must be given to the state…there is an absolute equality between man and woman…the results [in the USSR] have been catastrophic. Unprecedented wantonness. Youth criminality multiplying. No more stability.⁸⁹

 Bertier, “Evolution du mouvement E.D.F. depuis 1944”, p. 6.  Bertier, “Réponse de M. Bertier à la décision du Scoutisme Français du 31 décembre 1952”, p. 4.  R. Lew, “Rouge et jaune : les malentendus d’une rencontre”, in P. Delwit and J. Gotovitch (eds), La peur du rouge (Brussels, 1996).  “Par le trou de la serrure”, Le Moniteur du Progrès agricole et viticole, no. 261 (10 May 1953), p. 3.  A. Ancel, “Un communiste doit aimer la révolution plus que sa patrie”, La Terre Nouvelle, no. 202 (16 May 1953), p. 2.

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Fiches rurales went a step further and described a lurid fantasy of a communist matriarchy: Marxist language protecting the family practically amounts to “marrying women to the state”, the father does not exist, or exists only on occasion! We are in a matriarchy! and, perhaps tomorrow, with artificial insemination, the husband will become an organ of the past! Everything is possible.⁹⁰

Jean Delcroix, La Terre Nouvelle’s editor, referred to the struggle between communists and anticommunists as that between barbarians and civilised men, with special reference to the situation in Indochina.⁹¹ On another occasion, he referred to communists as “red termites” undermining the nation.⁹² He also linked these fears to concerns about immigration, denying the French nature of the party he referred to as the “so-called ‘French’ Communist Party” by noting the foreign origins of some of its leadership, including the Spanish Republican exile Félix Garcia and the Galician Jew Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont (whom he called “Kriminel-Valrimont”).⁹³ Similarly, another agricultural anticommunist declared that France could not become the “refuse dump” of the world, and accused immigrants of spreading “disorder and revolution among us”.⁹⁴ The antisocial image of communism is also apparent in the rhetoric of the emerging French middle-class movement. At this time, pioneers like Roger Millot attempted to develop in France a politics focused on that diffuse group known as the “classes moyennes”, as represented by Millot’s organisation the Comité national des classes moyennes (CNCM), including social segments as diverse as the engineers and middle managers represented by the Confédération générale des cadres (CGC), the small-business owners of the Confédération générale des petites et moyennes entreprises (CGPME) and the artisans of the Confédération nationale de l’artisanat (CNA). To define the “classes moyennes” was a difficult task, given that each of these groups had quite different socio-economic interests, so Millot and his collaborators settled on a definition based not on social position or material interest, but on values: the middle classes were the true in-

 R. P. de Lestapis, “La famille enjeu des luttes politiques d’aujourd’hui”, Fiches rurales, no. 11 (May 1946,) pp. 1– 6.  J. Delcroix, “Civilisés contre barbares”, La Terre Nouvelle, no. 34 (28 Jan. 1950), p. 1.  J. Delcrox, “Les termites rouges”, La Terre Nouvelle, no. 58 (22 July 1950), p. 1.  J. Delcroix, “Les Français du Parti communiste dit français”, La Terre Nouvelle, no. 37 (22 Feb. 1950), p. 1.  P. Sérandour, “Dire toute la verité”, Le Moniteur du Progrès agricole et viticole, no. 128 (24 Sept. 1950), p. 1.

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heritors of Western civilisation, the carriers of its moral system based on individualism, personal responsibility, self-reliance, and common sense (Bon sens, the title of the CNCM’s journal).⁹⁵ Implicit in this definition was the suggestion that their foes, the communist workers, did not share these values, and thus stood outside the confines of Western civilisation. Sometimes this was made explicit as well: Marcel Lucian, writing for Bon sens, declared that a takeover by the proletariat would mean a “complete stop of all technical development. What then would become of human progress?”⁹⁶ He contrasted the socially integrative, unifying spirit of the middle classes with supposedly divisive nature of the “proletariat of combat”.⁹⁷ Again, the Marxist working class was singled out as an anarchic, even foreign element, apart from the rest of civilised society. Jean EscherDesrivières, another contributor to Bon sens, reiterated the conflation of communism with savagery in describing it as a “barbarous solution” to the problems of the age.⁹⁸

III Conclusion Past historians of anticommunism in France have foregrounded discontinuities in the discourses of French anticommunists. There is good deal of truth in this, if one is focusing on the elite world of “high politics” and the arguments of intellectuals. However, a shift of perspective, towards an examination of popular anticommunism, reveals greater continuities, even across such epoch-making events as the First and Second World Wars. Far from being supplanted, discourses which linked communism to traditional concerns about the anarchic nature of the classes dangereuses, and the racial and sexual fears that accompanied them, persisted despite the prevalence of the totalitarian conception among elite opinion-makers. Indeed, as a result of this, other anticommunists in France, such as those active in the Catholic trade union movement, like Paul Vignaux or Albert Detraz, would try to distance themselves from the label anticommuniste, as it was too associated with anti-worker diatribes which were obviously not suc-

 M. Lucian, “Tournant de grande Histoire”, Bon sens, no. 1 (March 1948), pp. 5 – 12; M. Lucian, “Destin des Classes Moyennes”, Bon sens, no. 3 (May 1948), pp. 3 – 8.  Lucian, “Destin des Classes Moyennes”, p. 8.  M. Lucian, “Français moyen et Classes moyennes”, Bon sens, no. 4 (June 1948), p. 5.  J. Escher-Desrivières, “La doctrine des Classes moyennes et le Christianisme social”, Bon sens, no. 5 (Aug.-Sept. 1948), p. 106.

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cessful in convincing workers themselves to turn away from communism.⁹⁹ More broadly, this suggests the utility of social history in revealing commonalities that span conventional historical divides and challenge existing periodization schemes. One could perhaps carry the analysis even further in time. Fears of communism no longer play a major role in the French political scene, but in many ways these attitudes towards the classes dangereuses persist. The banlieues still exist as socially marginalised spaces, but they are now home to immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, who are the target of similar fears to those once expressed against the communist workers that lived in the very same locales. Didier Fassin has demonstrated the way in which these fears impact policing in Paris.¹⁰⁰ Nowhere was this more obvious than when then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy infamously described banlieue residents as racaille, scum, to be cleaned away with a high-pressure washer: a clear demonstration that the demise of anticommunism as a central political force has not meant the end of those social fears and antagonisms which inspired it.¹⁰¹

 “Réunion franco-americaine”, 17 March 1951, CP 24, Box 4, Fonds Paul Vignaux, Archives de la Confédération française démocratique du travail, pp. 4– 7.  D. Fassin, Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (Cambridge, 2013).  “Sarkozy et les banlieues”, INA, 31 Oct. 2005, http://www.ina.fr/video/2954175001011/sar kozy-et-les-banlieues-video.html (accessed 26 Jan. 2019).

Julia Secklehner

Chapter 4 Crossing Borders and Period Boundaries in Central European Art: The Work of Anna Lesznai (ca. 1910 – 1930) The normativisation of art history has a long tradition. From what is widely considered the discipline’s foundational text, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), the history of art has long viewed its subject matter as a lineage in which different stages of development follow each other in a logical succession, according to principles of progress and formal innovation.¹ Key to the establishment of the discipline, this way of periodizing forges categories which, besides referring to particular places in time and space (e. g. Vasari’s “Italian Renaissance”), help foreground what makes a given stage of development “innovative” or “progressive” and, thus, worthy of the scholar’s attention. While providing one of the most essential structuring devices for the history of art as a discipline and connecting its internal developments to broader events in social and political history, this system of periodization nonetheless comes with notable flaws. Even though Vasari’s account was recognised as the standard text for studies of the Italian Renaissance for centuries, it was predicated on a clear political-artistic bias: because of the support he received from the Florence-based Medici family, Vasari favoured Florentine painters, most notably Michelangelo, to their non-Florentine counterparts. As is well known, this had far-reaching consequences: while Florence gained a reputation as the cradle of the Renaissance, its rival city Siena was long relegated to secondary status and its artistic production presented as “lagging behind” that of Florence.² Though this well-known example stands at some spatial and temporal distance from the chapter’s main topic of investigation – periodization in the history of modern art in Central Europe – it nonetheless captures the essence of the issue: to quote Jacques Le Goff, “there is nothing neutral, or innocent, about cutting time Note: This chapter is part of a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC), under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 786314). I dedicate the text to the memory of Ada Hajdu (1978 – 2020), who brought me to this project and provided invaluable feedback and support in its early stages.  G. Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (London, 1914).  B. David, “Past and Present in Sienese Painting: 1350 – 1550”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 40 (2001), pp. 77–100. OpenAccess. © 2022 Julia Secklehner, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636000-005

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up into smaller parts”.³ Periodization produces exclusivist norms to bestow coherence on the sequence of artistic periods – the Italian Renaissance and 20th-century Modernism being two cases in point. As broad categories, these period labels have provided a heuristic structure for art-historical knowledge, a structure based on the succession of styles. Even so, they can only offer a simplified view of art history, one which inevitably overlooks whatever falls outside dominant visual regimes. The sense of teleological progress underpinning art-historical periodization allows, in the words of Frederic Schwartz, only a “one-dimensional movement of historical time”.⁴ One example of this monodimensionality is the established lineage of modern art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Successively leading from Impressionism to Constructivism, this lineage has long served as the major reference point for periodizations of 20th-century art – a visualisation of which is offered by Alfred Barr on the dustcover of the exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1936 (fig. 1).⁵ Post-colonial and gender theory have undoubtedly helped expose some of the social hierarchies behind this periodization, highlighting the role played by race, class and gender in determining which movements and artists are included in or excluded from the dominant lineage. Nevertheless, the broader practice of periodization – in which artists, styles and movements are bound to specific time periods – has remained notably resistant to change.⁶ The teleological narrative of modern art, as well as the periodization on which it rests, is still based on a Western canon, with Paris at the centre of artistic developments. This is best illustrated by the fact that the standard textbook Art Since 1900, even in its latest edition (2016), continues to focus almost exclusively on art history within Western Europe and the United States, presenting it as the history of art par excellence, rather than of art in the specific geographical context it refers to.⁷ The underlying assumption that Western art history represents the norm affects, in turn, how art history elsewhere is narrated and periodized. When this normative model is applied to the art history of Eastern and Central Europe, it is usually accompanied by an additional normative framework: methodological nationalism, a bias which causes artistic developments to be recognised only insofar as they are confined to and aligned with specific national spaces. In

 J. Le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods? (New York, 2015), p. 2.  F. J. Schwartz, “Ernst Bloch and Wilhelm Pinder: Out of Sync”, Grey Room, 3 (Spring, 2001), p. 63.  A. H. Barr, Cubism and abstract art (New York, 1936).  L. Nochlin, Women, Art, And Power and other Essays (New York, 2018 [1988]); P. Mitter, “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant–Garde Art from the Periphery”, The Art Bulletin, 90/ 4 (2008), pp. 531– 48.  H. Foster et al, Art Since 1900, vol. I: 1900 – 1944: modernism, antimodernism, postmodernism (London, 2016 [2004]).

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Fig. 1: Barr, Alfred Hamilton Jr. (1902 – 1981): Cover of the exhibition catalogue “Cubism and Abstract Art”, MoMA 1936. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Offset, printed in color, 7 3/4 x 10 1/4’ (19.7 x 26 cm). The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. MA143 © 2021. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

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other words, the history of modern Central European art, while delineated by the canonical narrative of modernism, is equally subject to the historical frameworks of individual nation states, each of which forges its own narrative of modernism. Paradoxically, then, treatment of Western art as the universal standard is accompanied, in East-Central Europe, by a superficially opposing tendency towards methodological nationalism, which foregrounds the supposed national particularities of various artistic movements or styles. Under the umbrella term “Central European modernism”, for instance, we find a plethora of nationally framed developments such as “Czech cubism”, “Austrian expressionism” or “Hungarian fauvism” – movements which, while implicitly referencing the Western canon, represent “a notion of culture enclosed within the territorial formation of the modern nation”.⁸ In more recent years, there has been a shift away from a narrow focus on the avant-garde to consider a broader range of modernist movements. However, the appraisal of artistic developments in Eastern and Central Europe remains predominantly squeezed between a national framework, corresponding to the nation-states founded after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, and the standards of teleological progress established by the Western canon.⁹ Even anthologies that promise transnational approaches, such as Krisztina Passuth’s Treffpunkte der Avantgarden (2003), or, more recently, the exhibition catalogues Beyond Klimt: New Horizons in Central Europe (2018) and Years of Disarray (2019), work within – as opposed to across – national frameworks, establishing cross-chapter comparisons rather than providing fully entangled histories.¹⁰ In short, the history of modern art in Central Europe is dominated by a periodization model that combines two seemingly contrasting orientations: a methodological nationalism that follows the state borders established after the fall of the Habsburg Empire, and a canon that,

 M. Juneja, “Alternative, Peripheral or Cosmopolitan? Modernism as a Global Process”, in J. Allerstorfer and M. Leisch-Kiesl (eds), “Global Art History” Transkulturelle Verortungen von Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft (Bielefeld, 2017), p. 85; J. Švestka et al., Czech Cubism, 1909 – 1925: art, architecture, design (Prague, 2006); P. Werkner, Austrian expressionism: the formative years (Seattle, 1995); K. Passuth and Gy. Szü cs, Fauves, Vadak: Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagyba´nya, 1904 – 1914 (Budapest, 2000); H. Gassner, Wechselwirkungen: ungarische Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik (Marburg, 1986).  B. Hock, K. Kemp-Welch and J. Owen (eds), A Reader in East-Central-European Modernism (London, 2019); M. Bartlová (ed), Budova´ni´ sta´tu: reprezentace Československa v uměni´, architektuře a designu (Prague, 2015); E. Forga´cs, Hungarian art: confrontation and revival in the modern movement. Avant-garde and modern movements (Los Angeles, 2017).  S. Rollig and A. Klee (eds), Beyond Klimt new horizons in Central Europe (Munich, 2018); M. Werner and B. Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison. Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity”, History and Theory, 45/1 (2006), pp. 30 – 50.

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though presented as “international”, was in fact constructed primarily with reference to artistic developments in early 20th-century France.¹¹ At first sight, this interplay between nation-specific and canonical principles of periodization appears contradictory in nature. It is all the more remarkable, then, that such a polyrhythmic dynamic forms the core of the standard post1989 volumes on Central European modernism: Steven Mansbach’s Modern Art in Eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Balkans (1997) and Timothy Benson’s Central European Avant–Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910 – 1930 (2002).¹² Mansbach in particular has argued that avant-garde groups in the region “pictured themselves as unique representatives of the emerging nation, as caretakers of the national culture”, while simultaneously characterising the growth of national artistic trends in the region as the result of “influence” from Western artists.¹³ In a review of Mansbach’s book, James Elkins has strongly criticised this approach, suggesting that “the continuous description of artists in terms of others, with dollops of exotic politics, language, and geography thrown in, is really nothing less than a kind of Orientalism”.¹⁴ The main point of contention with Mansbach’s approach is that, despite his attempts to emphasize the diversity of modern art in Eastern and Central Europe, his adoption of the Western canon as the standard implicitly places Eastern and Central European art in a subordinate position to painters in Paris and Berlin. In his representation of the Hungarian painter Vilmos Perlrott Csaba (1880 – 1955) as “influenced by” and even “indebted to” Cézanne, for example, Mansbach would establish a hierarchical relationship between the two, in which certain formal similarities were foregrounded as a sign of dependency.¹⁵ The very choice of a vocabulary built on artistic developments in France would implicitly force Csaba’s work into a framework of art history informed by foreign developments.

 B. Joyeux-Prunel, “Provincializing Paris. The Center-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantitative and Transnational Approaches.”, Artl@s Bulletin, 4/1 (2015), Article 4.  S. Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Balkans (Cambridge 1997); T. Benson (ed), Central European Avant–Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910 – 1930 (Cambridge, 2002).  Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe, p. 7.  J. Elkins, “Review of Steven Mansbach’s book Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890 – 1939 (1999),” The Art Bulletin, 82/4 (2000), p. 785.  Elkins, “Review of Steven Mansbach’s book”, p. 782. The most recent response to the challenges of writing on modernism in Central Europe is by Matthew Rampley, “Networks, Horizons, Centres and Hierarchies: On the Challenges of Writing on Modernism in Central Europe,” Umění, 69/2 (2021), pp. 145 – 162. Open Access here: https://craace.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ Umeni-2_21-Rampley.pdf

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There is little doubt that Central European artists, like artists elsewhere, would often look to Paris as the “centre” of modern art. However, as Elkins pointed out in his critique of Mansbach’s treatment of Central European art as a form of “belated/derivative” modernism, this influence was not simply uni-directional. A productive idea that can help accommodate both Western “influences” and local developments is Ernst Bloch’s notion of “the nonsimultaneity of the simultaneous”. Bloch would contend that “history is not an essence advancing linearly, in which capitalism, for instance, as the final stage, has resolved all previous stages, but is rather a polyrhythmic and multi-spatial entity with enough unmastered and as yet by no means revealed and resolved corners”.¹⁶ The influence of Parisian cultural developments on Hungarian artists can thus be integrated within a polyphonic narrative that constructs nationally specific art histories in reference to both local and Eurocentric canonical frameworks. Given that the dominant periodization of art has favoured a narrative in which progress is marked by linear transitions from one modern movement to the next, elements of gradual change or continuity that would blur this teleological narrative are often erased. This approach also excludes artists that do not fit within those art historical movements that are used as periodization devices, and those who moved between different national spaces – hence, across different national narratives of art.¹⁷ Just as Vasari focused on Florentine artists at the expense of non-Florentine ones, thereby excluding the latter from the canon of Renaissance art, so nationalised narratives of modernism in Central Europe develop their own exclusionary frames of periodization. As an interpretative tool that can help bridge the gap between myriad local specificities and an encompassing history of art, Bloch’s approach to periodization has the potential of broadening this system to include artists whose work does not conform to established spatial and temporal boundaries and who have thus been relegated to the margins.¹⁸ By focusing on Anna Lesznai (1885 – 1966), an artist whose life and work defied numerous spatial and temporal boundaries, this chapter highlights the limitations of linear and nationalised art histories and shows that the realities of

 E. Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit, Werkausgabe (Frankfurt, 1985), vol. IV, pp. 68 – 69. Translation from Schwartz, “Ernst Bloch and Wilhelm Pinder”, p. 63.  K. Srp, “Unstable Central Europe”, in K. Srp et al. (ed), Years of Disarray 1908 – 1928. Avantgardes in Central Europe (Olomouc, 2018), pp. 4– 19.  The relationship between avant-gardes of the centre and the periphery has been considered in a broader European context by P. Piotrowski, “Toward a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde”, in Europa! Europa?: the avant-garde, modernism, and the fate of a continent, ed. S. Bru (New York, 2009), pp. 49 – 58.

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Central European modernism were rather more entangled than the dominant system of periodization would suggest. As will be shown, Lesznai’s work in the 1910s and 1920s lends itself particularly well to the questioning and rethinking of art-historical period boudaries. Lesznai has predominantly been classified as a pre-First World War Hungarian modernist, based on the correspondences between her biography and artwork, on the one hand, and the defining features of Hungarian modernism in the late Habsburg Empire, on the other. After 1918, however, Lesznai almost disappears from historical narratives of Central European art, even though she continued to work successfully in Vienna and rural Czechoslovakia, before returning to Hungary in 1931.¹⁹ The occlusion of Lesznai’s post-1918 career from art-historical scholarship is revealing. When Hungary was part of the multi-national Habsburg Empire, Lesznai’s creative work could easily fit within the Hungarian narrative of art, both because she was based in Budapest and because Lesznai’s references to folk culture could be read as a reflection of the Empire’s multi-national character and, as such, a feature that was compatible with pre-1918 Hungarianness. However, with the nationalisation of the region after 1918, the enduring features of Lesznai’s pre-1918 work and lifestyle – her cosmopolitanism and the rootedness of her work in folk art and primitivism – would become much more difficult to reconcile with the methodological nationalism underpinning art-historical narratives in East-Central Europe. There was, moreover, another factor contributing to the erasure of post-1918 Lesznai from the history of art: the widening gap between her artistic production and that of groups more closely approximating art historians’ understanding of what it meant to be avantgarde in the 1920s. In short, after 1918 Lesznai’s work fell foul of both biases – methodological nationalism and teleological, progress-oriented Eurocentrism – structuring the periodization of Central European art history. By tracing how and where Lesznai’s work developed after 1919 and how it was received in new local contexts, this case study will not only reframe her work as that of a truly transnational modernist whose work bridged the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, but also expose the impoverishing effects that the aforementioned biases in periodization have on art-historical knowledge. In so doing, it will build an

 An exception to this general rule can be found in the small number of exhibition catalogues dealing with Hungarian contributions to the Hagenbund artists’ association in Vienna. These catalogues mention Lesznai in brief biographical sketches. A. Husslein-Arco, M. Boeckl and H. Krejci (eds), Hagenbund. Ein europäisches Netzwerk der Moderne 1900 – 1938 (Vienna, 2014); É. Bajkay et al. (eds), 6 Ungarn im Hagenbund: Béni Ferenczy, Anna Lesznai, Tibor Gergely, Georg Mayer–Marton, Elza Kövesházi Kalmár, Imre Simay (Vienna, 2015); Kunsthandel Widder, Sammlung Chrastek – Hagenbund (Vienna, 2019).

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argument for more nuanced approaches to Central European art history – approaches which can overcome the spatial, temporal and political limitations of (existing) period boundaries. In keeping with the main questions addressed in this volume, my chapter problematises dominant models of periodization and argues that a history of art that is tied to the temporal and geographical constraints of political boundaries cannot account for developments that stretch beyond the master narratives shaped by them.

I Anna Lesznai and the pre-war Hungarian avant-garde: period boundaries in the making Born as Amália Moscowitz to an ennobled Hungarian-Jewish family with connections to the highest instances of government, in her early twenties Lesznai became a member of Budapest’s avant-garde. In 1908, after a sheltered upbringing at the rural family estate in Körtvélyes, Upper Hungary (currently Nižný Hrušov, Slovakia; part of Czechoslovakia, between 1919 and 1992), a short-lived marriage and a sojourn in Paris, where she studied painting, Lesznai, aged 23 and a divorced mother-of-one, became a regular contributor to Nyugat (“West”, 1908 – 1941), a literary magazine that published progressive poetry and prose. Lesznai’s breakthrough as a visual artist and designer would come three years later, in 1911, when she was invited to exhibit her work alongside the avant-garde group of painters, A Nyolcak (“The Eight”). By creating a new visual language that built on artistic forms developed in France, A Nyolcak paved the way for the establishment of modern art in Hungary.²⁰ While Lesznai’s contributions to the group’s 1911 exhibition – a range of colourful embroidery designs – differed significantly from the French-inspired paintings of her peers, her participation in this widely received show nonetheless catapulted her into the ranks of the Hungarian avant-garde.²¹ Her position in the avant-garde would be further solidified through her subsequent membership in the Sunday Circle, officially founded in 1915.²² Led by György Lukács and Béla Balázs, the Sunday Circle was a group of young and progressively-minded intellectu The group was formed in 1906 by Károly Kernstok, Béla Czóbel, Róbert Berény, Ödön Márffy, Lajos Tihanyi, Dezső Orbán, Bertalan Pór and Dezső Czigány. G. Barki and Cs. Marko´ja, The Eight: Ro´bert Bere´ny, Dezső Cziga´ny, Be´la Czo´bel, Ka´roly Kernstok, Ö dö n Ma´rffy, Dezső Orba´n, Bertalan Po´r, Lajos Tihanyi (Pe´cs, 2010).  G. Barki and Z. Rockenbauer, “A Nyolcak auf dem Vormarsch”, in E. Benesch et al. (eds), Die Acht: Ungarns Highway in die Moderne (Berlin, 2012), p. 77.  M. Gluck, Georg Luka´cs and his generation, 1900 – 1918 (Cambridge MA, 2011), pp. 13 – 23.

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als that met weekly in Balázs’s Budapest apartment to discuss literature and philosophical ideas. Like Lesznai, several of its others members, who included the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the psychoanalyst Juliska Láng, came from assimilated Jewish families. Feeling alienated by the conservatism of the local intelligentsia, these progressive young intellectuals would use the Sunday Circle as a space for discussion and to engage with new ideas about society.²³ Moving between the Sunday Circle, A Nyolcak and Nyugat, Lesznai was closely involved with central representatives of Hungarian modernism in the late Habsburg Empire. Unsurprisingly, therefore, her creative output displayed many commonalities with some of the prevalent trends of the time. Lesznai belonged to a generation of Hungarian modernists deeply concerned with human isolation in the modern environment. In an undated diary entry, she stated: “The inhumanity of individualistic, capitalist society […] stems from the fact that its individual members are solitary atoms whose vital relationships are not with other men, nor with nature, but with abstract institutions”.²⁴ As a possible solution to modern isolation, the Sunday Circle celebrated notions of innocence and truth as natural and “authentic” states of being, which they found in the writings of Dostoyevsky, for example. They also placed particular importance on fairy tales, folk tales and dreams as means through which modern atomisation could be transcended. In her own writing, of which the best-known example is the children’s book The Journey of the Little Butterfly in Fairyland (1912), which she also illustrated (Fig. 2), Lesznai was particularly drawn to fairy tales, seeing them as visions for the harmonious coexistence between all human beings and the natural environment.²⁵ A sense of uprootedness was central to the concerns of the Sunday Circle, and has often been associated with its members’ position as assimilated Jews.²⁶ Lesznai herself referred to “nervousness and insecurity” as the condition of the assimilated “cultural Jew”.²⁷ For Lesznai, this feeling of uprootedness was intensified by her juggling of multiple social roles and identities – those of a

 E. Gantner, “The New Type of Internationalist. The Case of Béla Balázs”, in F. Laczó and J. von Puttkamer (eds), Catastrophe and Utopia: Jewish Intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s (Oldenbourg, 2018), pp. 91– 93.  Undated diary entry by Lesznai in Gluck, Georg Lukács and his Generation, p. 25.  Lesznai in Gluck, Georg Lukács and his Generation, p. 26. For selected writings see A. Lesznai, Wahre Märchen aus dem Garten Eden, trans. A. Hecker and I. Russy (Berlin, 2008).  Gluck, Georg Lukács and his Generation; Laczo and Puttkamer, Catastrophe and Utopia; T. Sandqvist, Ahasuerus at the Easel (Frankfurt, 2014).  Anna Lesznai’s response to a 1917 survey about perceptions of “Jewishness” in Huszadik Szaszad, p. 104; translation in Gantner, “The New Type of Internationalist”, p. 99.

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Fig. 2: Anna Lesznai, illustration for The Journey of the Little Butterfly in Fairyland, 1913, ink on paper. © Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, 2022.

Hungarian, a Jew, an aristocrat disconnected from the rural (Slovak) population of her beloved estate, a city dweller, and, finally, a woman constantly defying conventions in a society of strict etiquette and hierarchy. As a result, the quest for a place of belonging became a dominant theme in her creative work. In this context, Lesznai also developed an understanding of folk art and fairy tales as conceptual models for an ideal world in which humans would harmoniously live alongside each other in a natural environment. Thus, in Nyugat (1918) she would write: In the mese [fairy tale], in this beautiful state of each being next to the other, all things are on one plane. The mese is an ornamentally one-dimensional image, identical with the reality of the soul undifferentiated from itself. Ancient oneness: the dissolution of all things into an unbounded totality. The reality of the soul: the unbounded transcendent realm of the soul. These two magic expressions, which reveal the garden of Eden of the mese, at one time overlapped. Today, the existence of the mese beyond time and natural reality, its symbolic form that puts the past and the future into play, restores the connection between these long-ruptured categories.²⁸

 A. Lesznai, “Babona´s e´szreve´telek a mese e´s a trage´dia le´lektana´hoz”, Nyugat, 11/13 (1918), p. 6; translation in F. Stewart, “‘In the Beginning was the Garden’: Anna Lesznai and Hungarian Modernism, 1906 – 1919” (PhD Dissertation, York University, 2011), p. 240.

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In her practice as a visual artist, Lesznai’s embroidery, illustration and painting work translated this philosophy of universal harmony with close reference to folk art practices. Drawing inspiration from peasant art, folk culture and rural life, Lesznai remodelled these sources in line with her theoretical writing as utopian visions for a harmonious future.²⁹ This reliance on folk motifs connected Lesznai’s work to some of the dominant trends in Hungarian art and design in the early 20th century. Folk culture first became important to Central European art in the early 19th century, when the rise of nationalist movements invigorated a nostalgic quest for national origins in myths, fairy tales and folk songs.³⁰ By the turn of the 20th century, the cultural, social and economic reform ideas of the British Arts and Crafts Movement had found a positive reception across the region. In Hungary, folk art practices, designs, and themes were most prominently synthesised and redeveloped by the founders of the Gödöllő workshops, Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch and Sándor Nagy.³¹ Owing to a widespread desire for the preservation of traditional craftsmanship and establishment of a “national art”, folk art and culture grew not just in popularity, but also in political importance at the turn of the century.³² Having first learned needlework from her mother, as was usual in a noble household, Lesznai swapped the “Persian and oriental” patterns of her childhood for those that peasant women produced in the surrounding village of Lesná.³³ Taught by the women of Lesná, where no particular embroidery tradition dominated, Lesznai learned to recreate a range of embroidery techniques and patterns from different regions of Hungary. On this basis, she would eventually develop her own designs based on abstracted patterns, contrasting outlines and a mixture of different stitching techniques.³⁴ Highly popular, these “Lesznai

 A. Lesznai, “Embroidery”, Talk given in the Needleworker’s Club in Boston, 1940 (Archives of the Petőfi Literature Museum, Budapest); A. Lesznai, “Lecture Mdme Lesznai” (Archives of the Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest).  N. Gordon Bowe, Art and the National Dream. The Search for Vernacular Expression in Turnof-the-Century Design (Dublin, 1992).  K. Keserü , “The Workshops of Gö dö llő: Transformations of a Morrisian Theme”, Journal of Design History, 1/1 (1988), pp. 1– 23.  K. Gellér, “Romantic Elements in Hungarian Art Nouveau”, in Art and the national dream, pp. 117– 126; K. Keserü, “Vernacularism and its special characteristics in Hungarian Art”, in Art and the national dream, pp. 127– 142; J. Lukacs, Budapest 1900. A historical portrait of a city and its culture (New York, 1988); J. Szabadi, Art Nouveau in Hungary. Painting, Sculpture and the Graphic Arts (Budapest, 1989).  Lesznai in S. Swartz, “Mme. Lesznai Describes Hungarian Peasant Arts”, Wellseley College News (23 Nov. 1939), p. 5. Lesznai also took on the village name to show her affiliation with it.  Stewart, “In the Beginning was the Garden”, p. 115.

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designs” were passed on to the embroidery workshop that Lesznai established in 1912 in order to meet rising demand. In this workshop, peasant women from around the family estate would create sought-after artisanal products based on Lesznai’s designs.³⁵ Although her work was closely aligned with dominant cultural trends in terms of both style design and manufacturing process, Lesznai had no interest in using folk culture for the construction of a national art. On the contrary, she would object to such instrumentalizations of folk culture, declaring: “I find it one of the grossest falsifications to use peasant art as a weapon of national division and particularism”.³⁶ Nonetheless, Lesznai’s work was interpreted through a national lens. Writing in the German craft journal Stickerei-Zeitung und Spitzenrevue, the art critic and writer Anton Jaumann noted that: “the spirit, the tradition of the Hungarian needleworker, is awake in her consciousness […] she does not invent and create ‘for’ a people, but is instead herself a living, particularly vital part of the people’s body, whose dreams she dreams, whose formal gaze reawakens in her as an art”.³⁷ Similar assessments of Lesznai’s craftwork as “savouring […] the national”, to use the words of British crafts writer Amalia Levetus, offer further evidence of how the correspondences between Lesznai’s work and the dominant trend of folk design caused the former to be interpreted as a visual manifestation of the neo-Romantic national movements of the late Habsburg Empire.³⁸ Yet, for Lesznai, it was a quest for universal harmony – rather than any nationalist ideology – that her work gave expression to. Nevertheless, the prevailing interpretation of Lesznai’s work is revealing of how, at the time, her work still appeared synchronous to the period of national emancipation in Hungarian art, even though her desire to create a “universal” – as opposed to “national” – art already indicated its incongruity with a predominantly nation-oriented narrative. Lesznai’s positioning as a pre-war Hungarian modernist in subsequent arthistorical narratives is often based on her acquaintance with the leading figures of Hungarian modernism, and the fact that she moved within its central networks and produced artwork that resonated with some of the most important ar-

 Stewart, “In the Beginning was the Garden”, p. 309.  Lesznai, ‘“Embroidery”, p. 7.  A. Jaumann, “Neu-Ungarische Bunt-Stickereien von Anna Lesznai – Budapest”, Stickerei– Zeitung und Spitzenrevue (Dec. 1912), p. 76.  A. Levetus, “Hungarian Architecture and Decoration”, The Studio Yearbook of Decorative Art (London, 1914), p. 217.

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tistic concerns of the time.³⁹ Indeed, it is precisely on this pre-1919 Hungarian period that most of the scholarship on Lesznai’s craftsmanship and writing has focused. In synoptic works on Hungarian art, such as The History of Hungarian Art in the 20th Century (1999), Lesznai only features in the context of the early Hungarian avant-garde where her “decorative folk-style embroideries” are invoked, while her later art tends to be omitted.⁴⁰ Similarly, in her seminal work on Hungarian Art Nouveau, Judit Szabadi has characterised Lesznai’s visual and graphic work as “a late Hungarian offshoot of the universal Art Nouveau style”, thereby confining her production to the first two decades of the 20th century. In their influential exhibition catalogue on A Nyolcak, Gergely Barki and Csilla Marko´ja also claimed that “in the first half of the 1910s, Lesznai’s design work was at its peak”.⁴¹ Even exhibition catalogues that consider Lesznai’s work within a broader timeframe, such as Hagenbund: an international network of modernity 1900 – 1938 (2014), largely focus on her stylistic development before 1918 or, as in the case of 6 Hungarians in the Hagenbund (2015), privilege biographical information over a critical assessment of the artist’s creative production.⁴² As was recently pointed out by Anna Menyhért (2020), this frequent conflation of Lesznai’s creative work with her biography has favoured surface-level analyses instead of a more thorough engagement with her multi-faceted visual work.⁴³ There are few exceptions to this general rule. One of them is a recent analysis by design historian Rebecca Houze of the role of embroidered textiles in Lesznai’s work as a “model for stitching together a meaningful identity”.⁴⁴ Another, which in turn treats Lesznai’s work as a Gesamtkunstwerk, is a study in cultural history by Fiona Stewart (2011), which emphasises multi-modality as the key to understanding the artist’s practice of working “without boundaries”. Stewart’s focus, however, is limited – once again – to Lesznai’s formative years in pre1919 Hungary.⁴⁵ While Stewart acknowledges that “the work of Lesznai […] is well-positioned to question the polar opposition established by modernist schol-

 Lesznai’s first biography was published by Erzsébet Vezér in 1979, based on conversations with the artist. E. Vezér, Lesznai Anna élete, (Budapest, 1979). The artist also published a semi-autobiographical novel in 1966. A. Lesznai, Kezdetben volt a kert (Budapest, 1966).  G. Andrási et al., The History of Hungarian Art in 20th Century (Budapest, 1999), p. 48.  Szabadi, Art Nouveau in Hungary, p. 51. Barki and Marko´ja, The Eight, p. 482.  Husslein-Arco et al., Hagenbund; É. Bajkay et al, 6 Ungarn im Hagenbund.  A. Menyhért, Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers (Leiden, 2020), p. 232.  R. Houze, “The Art and Design of Anna Lesznai: Adaptation and Transformation”, in E. Shapira (ed), Designing Transformation. Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism, (London, 2021), p. 174.  Stewart, “In the Beginning was the Garden”, p. 289.

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arship between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ ideologies and practices”, her confinement of Lesznai to the 1906 – 1919 timeframe de facto reaffirms the reductionist framing of the artist as a Habsburg-era Hungarian modernist.⁴⁶ In reality, Lesznai’s career did not end in 1919. What is more, though the political rupture caused by the Empire’s collapse did generate important changes in Lesznai’s life, it did not result in significant discontinuity in the character of her artistic production. Nevertheless, Lesznai’s lifestyle and art came to lose their “synchronicity” with the dominant art-historical narratives for the post-1918 period. On the one hand, as we will see, the political events of 1918 – 1919 forced Lesznai to leave Hungary for Austria and Czechoslovakia – countries that had once fallen within the same geopolitical space as Hungary, but that after 1918 would be walled off from it by new national nationals borders and the separate, nationally oriented art-historical narratives these engendered. On the other hand, the political changes of 1918 – 1919 also marked the end of “pre-war Hungarian modernism” in the dominant narrative of Hungarian art history, which was instead propelled into new directions. The resulting incongruity between Lesznai’s post-1919 production and lifestyle, on the one hand, and the vectorality of nationalised art histories, on the other, would cause the former to appear anachronous and, thus, also to fall into oblivion.

II National boundaries and artistic continuities The rupture that put an end to the period of “pre-war Hungarian modernism” in the dominant art-historical narrative is inseparable from the political changes triggered by the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. On 16 November 1918, Mihály Károlyi became the first president of a democratic Hungary following the abdication of Emperor Charles I.⁴⁷ For a few months, Oszkár Jászi – Lesznai’s husband at the time – served as Minister of Nationalities and as Károlyi’s Adviser of Foreign Affairs. In March 1919 he would be forced into exile in Vienna after the communist Béla Kun toppled Károlyi’s government and declared Hungary a Soviet-style Republic of Councils.⁴⁸ Unlike her husband, Lesznai remained in Hungary. Though Lesznai would later insist on “how apolitical” most of the Sunday Circle had been during this period, several figures associated with the group

 Stewart, “In the Beginning was the Garden”, p. 20.  P. Sugar, P. Hanák and T. Frank, A History of Hungary (Bloomington, 1994), p. 298.  Gy. Litván, A Twentieth-century Prophet: Oscár Jászi, 1875 – 1957 (New York, 2006), pp. 186 – 188.

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did in fact serve in Kun’s government.⁴⁹ Amongst the most prominent appointments, György Lukács became Minister of Culture and Béla Balázs People’s Commissar for Education and Folk Culture. Lesznai too entered the government’s service. Thanks to her and Balázs’s previous work on the social functions of fairy tales, she would be appointed as a specialist on fairy tales in the Ministry of Education, a position instated by Lukács in the hope that compulsory fairy tale afternoons would promote people’s harmonious co-existence.⁵⁰ After one hundred days of increasingly radical communist rule, the Kun government was overthrown and replaced by a new reactionary regime led by Miklós Horthy. A former admiral in the Habsburg navy, Horthy re-established the Kingdom of Hungary (1919 – 1946), installing himself as its governor. Having taken an active part in the Republic of Councils, Lesznai was forced by the new threat of counter-revolutionary terror to go into exile, alongside many of her peers.⁵¹ Initially, exile took her to a familiar place: the family estate in Körtvélyes, which had become Nižný Hrušov after the transfer of Upper Hungary (now Slovakia), where the estate was located, to the new, post-1918 Czechoslovak Republic. Soon after fleeing Hungary, Lesznai, who was at least initially able to hold on to the family wealth, also bought a house in the Viennese suburb of Mauer; for the next decade, she would split her time between the Austrian capital and Nižný Hrušov.⁵² Lesznai’s departure from Budapest coincided with the standard caesura in Hungarian art history, signalling an end to the period characterised by A Nyolcak, the folk-art revival and the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the onset of a period of avant-gardes, defined by radical artistic responses to radically new socio-political circumstances.⁵³ In the Hungarian narrative, this shift would be epitomised by the group gathered around Lajos Kassák and his avant-garde magazine MA (“Today”, 1916 – 1926).⁵⁴ Having briefly supported the Republic of Councils (not for long due to a fallout with Kun), Kassák too was forced to flee Horthy’s counter-revolution, going

 Gluck, Georg Lukács and his Generation, p. 24.  Stewart, “In the Beginning was the Garden”, p. 291.  É. Forgács and T. Miller, “The Avant-Garde in Budapest and in Exile in Vienna”, in P. Brooker et al. (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III: Europe, 1880 – 1940 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 1128 – 1156.  É. Forgács and T. Miller, “The Avant-Garde in Budapest and in Exile in Vienna”, in P. Brooker et al. (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. III: Europe, 1880 – 1940 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 1128 – 1156.  S. Edwards and P. Wood (eds), Art of the Avant-Gardes (Yale, 2004).  Forgács and Miller, “The Avant-Garde in Budapest”, pp. 1128 – 1156.

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into exile in Vienna. Here, he resumed the publication of MA, using it as a platform to establish contacts with other avant-garde groups across the continent, in the name of an “internationalism and collectivism” that could counter the “nationalist and individualist host societies” of their exile and their place of origin.⁵⁵ In Hungary, meanwhile, conservative artistic tendencies represented by groups such as the “School of Rome” began to dominate the cultural scene, particularly in the first years of the Horthy regime.⁵⁶ Given the conservative turn in Hungary itself and the emigration of many cultural figures, the teleological narrative of Hungarian modernism at this point follows its protagonists into exile, relocating outside the country’s political borders. The Kassák circle represented only a fraction of the diverse Vienna-based Hungarian artistic diaspora. However, as the group that could most successfully claim for itself the mantle of the Hungarian avant-garde, it has been considerably overrepresented in art-historical scholarship. This is entirely in keeping with the disciplinary tendency to treat the most “progressive” artistic group in a given period as the bearer of a given nation’s art history. In other words, if the Kassák circle has eclipsed other artistic movements in the dominant narrative, this was thanks to its mastery of the specific forms and rhetoric associated with the artistic avant-garde. In an art-historical periodization scheme favouring progress and continuous renewal, the Kassák circle’s belligerence towards the traditional art world and demands for a breaking down of boundaries between art, society and popular culture won it centre stage, transforming it into a standard for Hungarian art of this particular period. Occluded in this master narrative, however, is the way modernism continued to evolve in a distinctly pluralist manner, with each of its currents evolving differently and at different speeds. One illustration of this plurality can be found in the post-1919 artistic career of Anna Lesznai who continued to build a visual identity based on references to folk motifs and rural culture. Far from signalling a caesura in her artistic style or prompting her to adopt the rupture- and novelty-oriented self-image of the avantgarde, the tumultuous events of 1918 – 1919 left no dramatic mark on Lesznai’s work.⁵⁷ This is not to say that her art remained static or unresponsive to new ar-

 Forgács, Hungarian Art, p. 112.  J. P. Szűcs, “A ‘Modern’ Official Art: The School of Rome”, in A Reader in East–Central European Modernism, Chapter 20.  E. Balázs, “MA and the Rupture of the Avant-garde 1917– 18: Reconstructing Aesthetic and Political Conflict in Hungary and the Role of Periodical Culture”, Journal of European Periodical Studies, 3/1 (2018), pp. 49 – 66; B. Hjartarson, “Myths of Rupture. The Manifesto and the Concept of Avant-Garde”, in Á. Eysteinsson and V. Liska (eds), Modernism (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 2007), pp. 173 – 194.

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tistic trends. After 1919, Lesznai redeveloped the ornamental patterns that she had used in her embroidery as the basis for watercolour and gouache depictions of village life around Nižný Hrušov. These depictions relied on formal abstraction and colour to forge a sense of order and harmony. Thus, whilst a painting like Sunday (1930, fig. 3) seemed tumultuous at first, each part of the image was in fact ordered through the clustering of similar forms. Lesznai achieved this effect by adopting a collapsed perspective, leading to a flattened picture plane that accentuated the image’s “naïve” style.⁵⁸ In her decision to revisit earlier motif choices whilst subjecting them to gentle formal adjustments, Lesznai responded to the growing fashion for abstraction without foregoing earlier elements in her work. From the perspective of a historical narrative associating 1918 with a radical artistic rupture, Lesznai’s continued adherence to quaint figurative forms certainly may appear anachronistic. Without the blinkering effects of such a narrative, however, it becomes apparent that through her reliance on folk themes Lesznai developed an alternative sense of artistic progress, in which formal changes and stylistic transformations took place as a slow, continuous process. Thus, in Lesznai’s watercolours, all kinds of stylistic or formal change were introduced gently and in harmony with previous motifs. As a result, Lesznai’s oeuvre retained its underlying continuity, even as it proved itself capable of responding to changes in her environment. For instance, owing to Lesznai’s frequent walks through Schönbrunn Zoo, the floral motifs of her early embroidery gave way to watercolours populated by exotic, fantastic animals, but in style these watercolours reproduced many of her embroidery’s features. The most emblematic example of this mixture of innovation and continuity is Animal Fantasy, a watercolour from the 1920s (fig. 4), which shows a plethora of animals stitched together on the image plane as if in an elaborate piece of embroidery. While the animals are shown alongside each other on a flattened plane and without any hierarchy, each species is given its own space, delineated by individual backdrops. As they became more playful and surreal, Lesznai’s motifs maintained “th[e] beautiful state of each being next to the other, all things [being] on one plane” of her pre-war embroidery and painting, and its resulting vision of natural harmony.⁵⁹ Yet while Lesznai’s shift to watercolour painting and abstract figures was in line with new artistic trends, her persistent reliance on folk motifs would rather complicate her position in the art-historical narratives of post-1918 Central Eu-

 P. Török, “Anna Lesznai und Tibor Gergely in Wien und im Hagenbund”, in 6 Ungarn im Hagenbund, p. 49.  Lesznai, “Babona´s e´szreve´telek”, p. 6.

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Fig. 3: Anna Lesznai, Sunday, 1930, watercolour on paper. © Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, 2022.

rope. For a start, the Hungarian émigré artist’s continued references to the folk culture of a region (the Slovak countryside around Nižný Hrušov) that now lay outside both her nation of origin (Hungary) and the city of her exile (Vienna) confounded easy national classification. In the new Central Europe of nationstates, understandings of which art “belonged” to which nation had to be negotiated anew. In Lesznai’s case, matters were further complicated by the fact that her ornamental treatment of the Slovak countryside was out of step with efforts to use the countryside as a resource in the construction of new national identities.⁶⁰And in a further complication for Lesznai’s place in the post-1918 art-historical canon, the folk motifs that she relied upon were incongruous with the thematic predilections of internationally oriented, post-1918 avant-gardes whose art generally betrayed an obsession with technology and modern life. Fitting neither a specific national framework nor that of the international avant-garde, Lesznai’s work sits uncomfortably within the art history of postHabsburg Central Europe – as if it had moved outside outside its “original” period. Lesznai’s ornamental images of rural life could easily be seen as the relic of

 A. Hrabušický, K. Bajcurova´ and A. Kusej, Slovensky´ my´tus (Bratislava, 2005).

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Fig. 4: Anna Lesznai, Animal Fantasy, 1920s. © Collection Peter Chrastek, Vienna.

a bygone era, and Lesznai herself as a “belated modernist” who clung onto ossified forms. However, as will be shown in the following section, it is possible to detect a more “synchronous” side to Lesznai’s work in the post-1918 period – something that has been obscured by teleological art-historical accounts blinkered by periodization norms. In particular, it will be argued that Lesznai’s apparent “belatedness” proves difficult to reconcile with her active involvement,

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and positive reception, in the Viennese cultural life of the 1920s – a contradiction that will help uncover some of the limitations of set periods in art history.

I Lesznai and Austrian modernism: inclusion Even though Lesznai lived and exhibited in Vienna for little over a decade, few other women artists active in the city during the 1920s encountered such a consistently positive reception. In the mid-1920s, Lesznai became associated with the Hagenbund artists’ association⁶¹ and the Wiener Frauenkunst,⁶² enabling her to move in Vienna’s most forward-looking and open artistic circles. Lesznai also regularly exhibited craftwork and watercolours in renowned galleries and at Hagenbund and Wiener Frauenkunst exhibitions; designed costumes for the local Yiddish theatre group Di Gildene Pawe; as well as writing and illustrating poetry, fairy tales and children’s stories in Hungarian and German.⁶³Actively involved in Vienna’s cultural life, Lesznai built connections with various local cultural figures: for example, she would regularly engage in literary discussions with the writers Maria Lazar and Heimito von Doderer, while Frauenkunst member Frieda Salvendy and Hagenbund Vice-President George Mayr-Marton were habitual guests at her house.⁶⁴ Mirroring her involvement in pre-1918 Budapest’s cultural scene, Lesznai’s engagement in the cultural life of post-1918 Vienna is indicative of her continued proximity to the modern artistic milieu, even though

 The Hagenbund, a progressive exhibition society founded in 1899 in protest at the conservatism of the Vienna academy, was to become Vienna’s most prominent artists’ association after 1918. Peter Chrastek et al., Expressionism, New Objectivity and Prohibition – Hagenbund and Its Artists (Vienna, 2016); Husslein-Aco et al., Hagenbund. Ein europäisches Netzwerk der Moderne 1900 – 1938 (Vienna, 2014).  An association of women artists, Wiener Frauenkunst was, in the words of Megan BrandowFaller, a “radical offshoot” of the moderate Austrian Association of Women Artists. Founded in 1926, the Wiener Frauenkunst “espoused the notion of an aesthetically distinct women’s art and equality of the fine and applied arts” whilst taking a decidedly progressive stance towards modern art and women’s emancipation. M. Brandow-Faller, “Tenuous Mitschwestern: The Mobilization of Vienna’s Women Artists and the Interwar Splintering of Austrian Frauenkunst”, Austrian Studies, 21 (2013), p. 149.  R. Lackner, “Für die lange Revolution! Die Vereinigung Bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs 1910 – 1985 und der Verband Bildender Künstlerinnen und Kunsthandwerkerinnen Wiener Frauenkunst 1926 – 1938/1946–1956. Eine Re-/Konstruktion” (PhD Dissertation, University of Vienna, 2017); K. Jesse, “‘Außerordentliche Frauen’ im Hagenbund. Künstlerinnen und ihre Netzwerke”, in Hagenbund, p. 362; “‘Der goldene Pfau’ Premiere bei der ‘Güldenen Pawe‘”, Die Stunde (10 Jan. 1925), p. 6.  É. Bajkay, “Ungarn im Hagenbund, Hagenbund in Ungarn”, in Hagenbund, p. 320.

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this engagement with modern art occurred in a different city which, as will be shown, developed its own narratives of modernism. By the mid-1920s, Lesznai began to exhibit more regularly in the Austrian capital. In 1925, she even participated in the summer group exhibition of Vienna’s Neue Galerie. Although only two years had past since its foundation in 1923, this gallery had already showcased some of Vienna’s most revered prewar artists, including Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka.⁶⁵ Here, Lesznai exhibited together with artists such as Anton Faistauer and the young Otto Rudolf Schatz, who would be awarded the Great Austrian State Prize the same year. Participating in this exhibition, therefore, allowed Lesznai to show her work – more than sixty in total, including craft objects and a number of sketches and watercolours – alongside established artists.⁶⁶ The elements of folk culture in Lesznai’s work would be received positively by the press: Particularly interesting are the craft objects of Anna Lesznay [sic], who lifts Ruthenian folk art objects into the realm of fine art. Her embroideries, drafts for book ornamentation, wooden objects etc. all have a sense of the original, the personal, that which one seeks in vain in the “artistic” crafts of our women. Her works are the opposite of kitsch, because they are simple, authentic and always comply with their original purpose.⁶⁷ With her abundantly rich, naturally naïve and visionary intellectual personality, Mrs Lesznai possesses the unlimited talent to express herself fully and to successfully convey both the folklishly simple and artistically conscious.⁶⁸ As forms brought to life with a true reliance on childish fantasy, [Lesznai’s work] could only spring from the soul of tirelessly overflowing motherly love and could only be created by the hand of a real artist.⁶⁹

These positive reviews show not only that Lesznai’s work was seen as modern, feminine and authentic, but also that it aligned with contemporary trends in Austrian art. To explore this further, it is necessary to take a closer look at the cultural framework implied by the reference to “Ruthenian” craftwork and folk art, as well as its significance in the Austrian context.

 C. Tessmar, Neue Galerie: Otto Nirensteins Erfindung der Moderne (Vienna, 2007), pp. 3 – 7.  “18. Ausstellung Faistauer – Probst – Schatz – Seeland – Lesznai 1925”, Archive material Galerie Belvedere, exhibition correspondence 595/1– 6.  F.k. “Neue Galerie (Sommerausstellung)”, Der Tag (24 June 1925), p. 8.  “Aquarelle der Anna Lesznai”, Die Stunde (9 Jan. 1926), p. 8.  L. Berényi, “Das Kind. Eine Ausstellung, die man sehen muss”, Die Bühne, 62 (1926), p. 61.

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Located in the far eastern corner of post-1918 Czechoslovakia, not far from Lesznai’s estate, Subcarpathian Ruthenia was by far the least developed part of interwar Czechoslovakia, a deeply rural frontier region which had become a sought-after travel destination for artists, ethnologists and writers.⁷⁰ While the romanticisation of Ruthenian peasant culture had its greatest resonance in the new Czechoslovak state, evocations of this former Austro-Hungarian hinterland comparing it to a “jungle and medieval age”, to quote one journalist, would also be plentiful in the Viennese press.⁷¹ Invariably, the region was presented as wild and poor, yet also idyllic, and unique in its ethnic and religious multiplicity – in other words, as a remnant of some otherworldly “authenticity” that had been lost in the modern world. Whilst most strongly linked to the ideas of the Arts and Crafts Movement with which Lesznai’s pre-war work had dovetailed, this yearning for a lost rural arcadia was also deeply embedded in the culture of interwar Austria, where it was closely bound up with the pursuit of new sources of artistic inspiration.⁷² While the turn towards the countryside has generally been associated with the conservative Heimat movement, in reality it encompassed a much broader and politically varied range of tendencies and was seen, particularly in Austria, as part of a wider regeneration process.⁷³ 1918 had seen not only the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, but also the demise of some of Vienna’s most celebrated artists and designers, including Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and Otto Wagner. Pitted against this general decline, and the new Austrian Republic’s struggle with economic collapse and political instability, the decadent culture of “Vienna 1900” would soon be perceived in nostalgic terms as a lost era of plenty.⁷⁴ Connectedly, artists began to look for sources of cultural rejuvenation. While many found a solution by moving to other cities, particularly Paris and Berlin, others remained in Austria and found inspiration in peasant art and the provinces. Anton Faistauer, who exhibited alongside Lesznai in 1925, went

 A. Hrabušicky, “A quiet celebration of Slovakia”, in A. Hrabušicky´ and V. Macek (eds), Slovak Photography 1925 – 2000 (Bratislava, 2001), p. 17.  H. Margulies, “Reise durch Urwald und Mittelalter”, Der Tag (7 Feb.1932), p. 6.  G. Barth-Scalmani, H.J.W. Kuprian and B. Mazohl-Wallnig, “National Identity or Regional Identity: Austria versus Tyrol/Salzburg”, in G. Bischof and A. Pelinka (eds), Austrian Historical Memory and National Identity (New York, 2018 [1997]), p. 33.  W. Kos (ed), Kampf um die Stadt. Politik, Kunst und Alltag um 1930 (Vienna, 2010), pp. 98 – 137.  A. Kożuchowski, The Afterlife of Austria-Hungary. The Image of the Habsburg Monarchy in interwar Europe (Pittsburgh, 2013); W. Kos and C. Rapp (eds), Alt-Wien. Die Stadt, die niemals war (Vienna, 2004).

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so far as claiming that the only productive form of cultural renewal was that which linked all forms of cultural production to local contexts.⁷⁵ Indeed, some Austrian scholars have even suggested that in the interwar period regionalism replaced Austrian national identity altogether, as a kind of reaction against the imperial identity that had dominated among German-speaking Austrians in the decades before the First World War.⁷⁶ Thus, even before the rise of Austro-fascism and National Socialism, regionalism and folk art represented significant aspects of post-Habsburg Austrian culture. In conventional periodizations of modern art in the region, this focus on the rural has been interpreted as a sign of the general “belatedness” and non-synchonicity of post-1918 Austrian art: lacking an avant-garde that would fit the normative demands of the art-historical canon, post-Habsburg Austrian art is still, by and large, portrayed as a kind of “post scriptum” to the glorious years of Vienna 1900, as shown by exhibition catalogues such as The Lost Austrians 1918 – 1938, Lost Modernity and Uncertain Hope: Austrian Painting and Graphic Design, 1918 – 1938. ⁷⁷ Despite recent attempts to establish the Viennese Kineticists (gathered around Franz Čižek at the Viennese School of Applied Arts) as the “Austrian avant-garde”, the absence of groups identifying themselves with the international avant-garde, like the Kassák group in the Hungarian context, has made Austrian art an awkward fit for the broader canonical narrative of European art, often leading to its exclusion.⁷⁸ At the same time, the reason why Lesznai was so well-received in Vienna in the 1920s, while seeming out of sync with developments in Hungarian art, was precisely that her reliance on folk culture and rural motifs chimed with a local regionalist quest for the “authentic”. Lauded as an artist of “limitless talent” who could translate “folk art into the realm of fine art”, Lesznai was not so much an epigone from a past epoch as an artist whose work responded to artistic developments in her immediate environment. ⁷⁹ The artist’s relocation to Vienna after 1919 had simply placed her in a “new” national art history – an art history

 A. Faistauer, Neue Malerei in Österreich. Betrachtungen eines Malers (Vienna, 1923), p. 5.  Barth-Scalmani, Kuprian and Mazohl-Wallnig, “National Identity or Regional Identity”, p. 31.  O. Oberhuber (ed), Die verlorenen Österreicher 1918 – 1938? Expression – Österreichs Beitrag zur Moderne. Eine Klärung der kulturellen Identität (Vienna, 1982); T. Natter (ed), Die verlorene Moderne. Der Künstlerbund Hagen 1900 – 1938 (Vienna, 1993); C. Bertsch and M. Neuwirth, Die Ungewisse Hoffnung: ö sterreichische Malerei und Graphik zwischen 1918 und 1938 (Salzburg, 1993).  G. Bast, Wiener Kinetismus – eine bewegte Moderne (Vienna, 2011).  “Aquarelle der Anna Lesznai”, Die Stunde (9 Jan. 1926), p. 8; F.K. “Neue Galerie (Sommerausstellung)”, Der Tag (24 June 1925), pp. 7– 8.

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that would subsequently fall outside the main narrative of modern art in Central Europe.⁸⁰ In short, that Lesznai’s work fell into oblivion, despite being attuned to the concerns of her Austrian contemporaries, is closely tied up with her relocation to Vienna – a move that involved crossing not just a spatial, but also what the dominant art-historical narrative construes as a temporal, boundary. Falling outside the dominant visual regimes of canonical narratives, Lesznai’s work appeared to be out of sync with contemporary developments and thus deserving of marginal status. Further, Lesznai is denied a place within the post-1918 Central European canon by the region’s post-Habsburg tendency to nationalise art historical developments, a practice reinforced in art-historical scholarship since 1989.⁸¹ The Kassák circle, for example, is considered the Hungarian strand of the avant-garde, even though the group’s outlook had a decidedly international focus: by representing a link to “progressive” developments at the international level, the group gained prestige within the national canon.⁸² For Lesznai, a failure to keep up with apparent progressive norms (as defined by the canon) combined with her exile from her home country would translate into a double exclusion. As will be shown in the next section, even at the time Lesznai’s full acceptance in Austria was hampered by her status as a migrant artist: even though her visual work fitted in with dominant trends in Austrian painting – itself maginalised as nonsynchonic with broader narratives – Lesznai’s Hungarian identity prevented her from full admission into the canon of Austrian art. This shows how the periodization norms governing Central European art history, informed as they are by biases towards teleological progress and methodological nationalism, can even end up excluding successful artists who kept up with contemporary trends from canonical narratives.

 The marginality of post-1918 Austrian art is visible in the fact that it has been consistently omitted from most standard accounts of modern art in the region, from Mansbach’s book in the 1990s to more recent publications like Reader in East-Central-European Modernism and Years of Disarray. Beyond Klimt represents a rare exception. Rollig and Klee, Beyond Klimt; Hock et al., A Reader in East-Central-European Modernism; Srp et al., Years of Disarray.  J.Bakoš, “A Remark on Globalization in (East) Central Europe”, in J. Elkins, Z. Valiavicharska and A. Kim (eds), Art and Globalization (University Park PA, 2010), pp. 205 – 208; E. András, “What Does East-Central European Art History Want? Reflections on the Art History Discourse in the Region since 1989”, in Extending the Dialogue. Essays by Igor Zabel Award Laureates, Grant Recipients, and Jury Members, 2008 – 2014 (Berlin, Ljubljana, Vienna, 2016), pp. 52– 77.  This is most obvious in Gassner, Wechselwirkungen.

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III National art histories vs the foreign artist: exclusion The yearning for the “rural” as a place of recovery and recovered “authenticity” was deeply embedded in post-1918 Austrian culture and constituted an important part of the quest for artistic renewal. With the biggest political and social conflicts taking place in Vienna, regional centres came to be seen as a site of rejuvenation.⁸³ This would strengthen the role of regional (as opposed to national) identities in Austrian culture, as well as invigorating artists’ attraction to the countryside as a repository of regional heritage. A recurring theme within this fascination for the rural was, as Faistauer argued in 1926, the necessity of being “at home” (das In-der-Heimat-sein) with one’s art – in other words, of linking all forms of culture to their regional context of production for the purpose of artistic renewal.⁸⁴ The search for a place of belonging – for a “home” (Heimat) – thus almost seamlessly converged with the pursuit of new regionalist identities. In simplified terms, Heimat meant the search for a safe, native place that represented a person’s or group’s authentic origins. It was a trope employed across the political spectrum.⁸⁵ In pictorial representations, the idea of an “original” Austria would often be evoked through references to one region in particular – Tyrol, in Western Austria, which Hermann Bahr had described, as early as 1899, as “male, forceful and thoroughly German”.⁸⁶ As a place of “authenticity”, by the mid-1920s Tyrol had become not only a popular and intensely marketed tourist destination, but also a common backdrop for the canvases of numerous artists, most notably Alfons Walde, Herbert Gurschner and Albin Egger-Lienz. By combining the representation of folk culture and traditional rural life (farming communities, religious scenes and alpine landscapes) with modern artistic forms, their work represented a regional form of modernism.⁸⁷  Barth-Scalmani, Kuprian and Mazohl-Wallnig, “National Identity or Regional Identity”, p. 33.  A. Faistauer, “Das Fresko”, Bau- und Werkkunst (1926), p.20.  M. Puchberger, “Heimat-Schaffen in der Großstadt. ‚Volkskultur‘ im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit”, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, 27/2 (2016), pp. 33 – 66; C. Rapp, “Schnelle Neue Alpen. Schnappschüsse der Moderne aus Österreichs Bergen”, in Kampf um die Stadt, pp. 123 – 124; H. Nikitsch, “Heimat in der Stadt. Von Trachtler, Tänzern und Proletarier”, in Kampf um die Stadt, pp. 137– 145.  H. Bahr, “Die Entdeckung der Provinz (1899)”, in C. Pias (ed), Hermann Bahr. Kritische Schriften (Weimar, 2010), p. 147.  G. Amann (ed), Alfons Walde (Innsbruck, 2001); C. Thun-Hohenstein and K. Pokorny-Nagel (eds), Franz von Zülow. Papier (Nuremberg, 2013); R. Leopold, Abin Egger-Lienz 1868 – 1926

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These images display some obvious similarities with Lesznai’s watercolours and craftwork, first and foremost in their depiction of a rural world removed from modern life. Tyrol and Subcarpathian Ruthenia played analogous roles in the Austrian/Czechoslovak imaginary, as remote lands perceived by urban intelligentsias as repositories of tradition cocooned from modernity by virtue of their peripheral remoteness. In the artistic realm, such conceptions translated into a tendency to represent each region through highly stylised and composed depictions of peasant communities at their colourful best, donning folk costumes and engaged in festivities and religious celebrations. When everyday labour was depicted, it was shown in an idyllic light, eliminating any trace of the hardship endured by toiling peasants. Given the idealised nature of such depictions, it made little substantive difference whether the countryside in question was “local” (e. g. Tyrol) or “exotic” (e. g. Subcarpathian Ruthenia) and whether the artist was an outsider or a “local”. Yet, despite these visual similarities between Heimat art and Lesznai’s depictions, the Viennese press would consistently characterise Lesznai’s work as “exotic” and “timeless” – qualities reinforced by her identity as a woman with a “child-like” spirit, whose success was based on her apparent proximity to nature and primitive culture.⁸⁸ Who or what this “primitive culture” comprised was less clear: Lesznai’s art would be interchangeably described as “Ruthenian”, “oriental”, “Hungarian”, “Slovak” or “Slovako-Hungarian”, without any further explanation.⁸⁹ Quite simply, for Lesznai’s Viennese audience, her village scenes from eastern Czechoslovakia became schematically merged into a single eastern idyll: Oriental, colourful, half-familiar and half-unknown – a far cry from the “powerful” and “honest” qualities attributed to the Austrian regionalists. Lesznai’s role in Vienna’s art world was, thus, to represent the “Other” – always a foreign woman, despite the positive reception and commercial success of her work.⁹⁰ Even though Lesznai’s regionalism was in line with the defining elements of interwar Austrian modernism, it was nonetheless perceived as distinct due to the foreignness of both the artist and her subject matter.

(Vienna, 2008); C. Widder and R. Widder, Herbert Gurschner. Ein Tiroler in London (Innsbruck and Vienna, 2000).  “Aquarelle der Anna Lesznai”, p. 8.  F.k., “Neue Galerie [Sommerausstellung]”, p. 7; M. E., “Anna Lesznai-Jaszi oder die Geburt der Malerei aus dem Geist des Lebkuchens”, Der Tag (26 Jan. 1926), p. 3; R. Harlfinger, “Die Ausstellung ‘Wiener Frauenkunst’”, Die Österreicherin, 2 (1928), p. 5; “Bilderausstellung ‘Anna Lesznai’”, Die Bühne, 60 (1925), p. 18.  M. E., “Anna Lesznai-Jaszi”, p. 3.

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Lesznai’s potential inclusion in the artistic canon of her second place of exile – the eastern Czechoslovak provinces whence she drew much of her inspiration – would also be complicated by the creation of nation-states in 1918. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Lesznai would spend several weeks each summer and winter on the family estate in Nižný Hrušov. According to the American art historian Stanton Lewis Caitlin, who as a student stayed at the estate in the summer of 1937, Lesznai even established an unofficial “summer artists’ colony”, within easy reach of the town of Košice.⁹¹ Košice, which has recently been “rediscovered” as the first Slovak cultural hub in Czechoslovakia and the centre of “Košice modernism”, harboured a pluralist culture.⁹² With its multiethnic urban culture that defied easy national classification, the identity of Košice was one marked by distinct localist tendencies that were more capable of encompassing local diversity compared to national categories. Indeed, as Zsófia Kiss Zeman has suggested, Košice’s multiethnic character would later contribute to its modernism’s omission from Czech, Slovak and Hungarian art-historical narratives.⁹³ Just like in Vienna, Lesznai’s work was well-received in Košice. In October 1924, she participated in the jubilee exhibition of the Kazinczy Circle cultural association at the East Slovak Museum, exhibiting various craft objects as well as five watercolours.⁹⁴ As one of the first scholars to acknowledge the contribution of Hungarian artists to Košice’s interwar culture, Lesznai’s contemporary Kálmán Brogyáni paid particular note to Lesznai’s watercolours from the exhibition, describing them as “pure, lively art” that “draws not only on the motifs but also the spiritual content and style of Slovakia [emphasis mine]”.⁹⁵ In keeping with the post-1918 nationalist Zeitgeist, Lesznai’s watercolours of the villages around Košice were emphatically framed in the now Slovak city of Košice itself as representations of Slovak life, and, thus, a potential resource in the construction of a local

 Lesznai’s Hrušov summer salon has yet to be properly researched. Smithsonian Archives of American Art, “Oral history interview with Stanton L. Catlin, 1989 July 1– September 14”, https:// www.aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_215546.  J. Purchla, “Košice and Košice Modernism in Kraków”, in N. Żak and Zs. Kiss-Szemán (eds), Košice Modernism (Krakow, 2016), p. 13.  Zs. Kiss-Szemán, “Košice Modernism and Anton Jaszusch’s Expressionism”, in, I. Wünsche (ed), The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context (Routledge Handbooks Online, 2018).  The craft objects, almost exclusively produced by women artists, were shown in a separate section. Vystava umelcov zo Slovenska v Košiciach (Košice, 1924); M. Gmitrová, “Exhibitions in Kosice between 1900 and 1938”, in Z. Bartošová and L. Lešková (eds), Košice Modernism and its Wider Context (Košice, 2013), p. 111.  K. Brogyáni, Festőművészet Szlovenszkón. Tanulmány, (Košice, 1931), pp. 122 – 127.

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modern culture, built on the imagery of a rural people closely tied to the mythical landscape of its homeland.⁹⁶ Brogyáni, for instance, treated Lesznai’s work alongside other local painters of both Slovak and Hungarian origin, such as Martin Benka and Štefan Prohászka-Tallós, as an example of modern Slovak painting, characterising Lesznai as a “highly decorative painter with a rich imagination”, “mainly influenced by Slovak folk themes”.⁹⁷ Thus, unlike in Vienna, where it was received as “exotic”, in eastern Czechoslovakia Lesznai’s work was initially accommodated within the founding myth of a new national art, thanks to its formal consonance with the dominant artistic narrative of the time. Despite this promising beginning, from the mid-1920s Lesznai’s chances of being included in the Slovak national canon would fade. By this point, the city of Bratislava had been elevated to the rank of Slovakia’s leading cultural centre, relegating Košice to a secondary position.⁹⁸ As a result, Košice and its artists would largely fall into oblivion until the 1960s, when art historian Tomáš Štraus began to rehabilitate selected artists from the region, most notably Anton Jaszusch.⁹⁹ It was not, however, until much more recent exhibitions, such as Košice Modernism and its Wider Context (2013), that Lesznai’s contributions to modern art in the region began receiving any recognition.¹⁰⁰ An emphasis on the exceptionally multi-ethnic character of Košice in this exhibition catalogue, however, has only confirmed its – and with it Lesznai’s – marginality to the mainstream history of Slovak modernism.¹⁰¹ After her return to Hungary in 1931, Lesznai did not manage to reintegrate herself into the interwar Hungarian canon, even though she taught in Dezső Orbán’s Atelier art school and exhibited in Hungary in the 1930s. Forced to re-emigrate in 1938, her subsequent career path in the United States, where she also taught and exhibited, has remained completely unexplored.¹⁰² Lesznai’s first and only retrospective at the Hungarian National Gallery took place in 1976, where she was emphatically framed as a Hungarian national artist whose

 J. Abelovsky, “Identita a moderna”, in Slovensky mytus, pp. 9 – 24.  Brogyáni, Festőművészet Szlovenszkón, p. 73.  Kiss-Szemán, “Košice Modernism”.  T. Štrauss, Slovenský variant moderny (Bratislava, 1992); T. Štrauss, Zwischen Ost– und Westkunst. Von der Avantgarde zur Postmoderne. Essays (1970 – 1995) (Munich, 1995).  Even then, the focus was on Lesznai’s pre-1918 work. Z. Bartošová, “Interwar Košice as the centre of artistic events”, in Košice Modernism, p. 84.  Z. Bartošová, “Palimpsest ako jeden z možných jazykov interpretácie dejín umenia 20. Storočia”, World Literature Studies, 5/22 (2013), pp. 56 – 74.  See Lesznai’s lecture notes at the Petőfi Literature Museum, Budapest, and the Greta Loebl Collection, Leo Baeck Institute, New York.

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work peaked in the late Habsburg Empire.¹⁰³ Her departure from Vienna would also seal her exclusion from the dominant narratives of Austrian art history. After this date, her work would not be discussed at all in Austria, aside from a few listings in a handful of 1930s exhibition reviews.¹⁰⁴ Indeed, Lesznai’s work would not be considered as a part of Austrian art history until the 2015 exhibition catalogue Die 6 Ungarn im Hagenbund (2015), where Lesznai was represented as one of six Hungarian artists active in the Hagenbund in the first half of the 20th century.¹⁰⁵ While presenting her as one of the most integrated migrant artists in the interwar Hagenbund, the exhibition nevertheless “nationalised” Lesznai, treating her status as a Hungarian artist in Vienna as the principal reason for her inclusion in the catalogue. In short, the methodological nationalism of Central European art history has significantly obscured Lesznai’s career outside the period of pre-war Hungarian modernism to which she has been assigned. Even though her art and design evolved in step with local artistic developments in the 1920s, reflecting the regionalist tendencies of Austrian and Slovak art, the methodological nationalism that set in after 1918 and that has barely been challenged since would result in her exclusion from art-historical narratives both at the time and in subsequent scholarship.

IV Conclusion Whilst Lesznai’s pre-1918 art is widely recognised as having been embedded in Hungarian modernism, after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire Lesznai would fall outside the scope of art-historical narratives and the new nation-oriented and avant-garde-led period they projected onto the years after 1918. The art-historical image of post-Habsburg Hungarian art would instead be dominated by the Kassák group, whose avant-garde style and self-presentation aligned it with canonical developments in the West. As Lesznai continued to base her work on folk art and rural culture, from the perspective of canonical periodization she would increasingly appear as an epigone unworthy of attention in the post-1918 world. In reality, Lesznai’s art remained in step with post-1918 developments in Austrian and Slovak art, a fact that was reflected in her continued pop-

 É. Bájkay, Lesznai Anna (1885 – 1966) (Budapest, 1976).  “Graphik im Hagenbund”, Die Stunde (17 Nov. 1932), p. 5; W. Born, “Graphikausstellung im Hagenbund”, Neues Wiener Journal (17 Nov.1932), p. 8; “Die schöne Wand. Ausstellung der Wiener Frauenkunst”, Arbeiter Zeitung (6 April 1933), p. 10; P. Chrastek, “Die Entdeckung des Hagenbunds”, in Sammlung Chrastek – Hagenbund, p. 4.  Török, “Anna Lesznai und Tibor Gergely”, pp. 40 – 51.

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ularity in her new host countries. However, despite this positive contemporary reception, Lesznai’s status as an “other” in both contexts would lead to her exclusion from subsequent national art-historical narratives. Even the “rediscovery” of Lesznai’s work in recent exhibitions has done little to change her image as an artist of pre-war Hungary – an image that inevitably erases her post-1918 work. Through the simple fact of having produced roughly similar art in different national contexts and across decades that have come to be known for different styles, Anna Lesznai’s career is hard to reconcile with a periodization scheme underpinned by teleological and unilinear notions of progress and organised around exclusionary national frameworks. By disrupting the boundaries that such periodization constructs, Lesznai’s art offers a sense of continuity in the face of (largely constructed) historical ruptures. In doing so, her work exposes “the nonsimultaneity of the simultaneous” that is an intrinsic, but usually ignored, feature of Central European art history, as well as the homogenising distortions that come with a periodization framework that is simultaneously constrained by the “international” canon of Western art and a bias towards methodological nationalism. Lesznai is far from being only the victim of such distortions. Her fate is, in fact, representative of the similar occlusion of many individual Central European artists and designers, among whom Friedl Dicker Brandeis, Zofia Stryjeńska or Marie Hoppe Teinitzerová.¹⁰⁶ By reintegrating artists like Lesznai into the broader story of art, as this chapter sought to do, scholars can hopefully overcome ossified period boundaries and develop new, more nuanced perspectives on the history of Central European art.

 E. Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Vienna 1898 – Auschwitz 1944: the artist who inspired the children’s drawings of Terezin (Los Angeles, 2001); S´wiatosław Lenartowicz, Zofia Stryjeńska: 1891 – 1976 (Krakow, 2008); H. Dobešova´, Uměni´ řemesla: život a di´lo, Marie Hoppe-Teinitzerova´ 1879 – 1960 (Jindřichův Hradec, 2004).

Aleksei Lokhmatov

Chapter 5 “Periodizations” in Intellectual History: On the Plurality of Continuities in the Public Debates of Post-War Poland “There is a certain great tendency in every epoch of humanity, and progress is based on the fact that there is a certain movement of the human mind in every period, which sometimes emphasizes one tendency, sometimes another.”¹ With these words, Leopold von Ranke, one of the founders of professional historiography, expressed his simultaneously stadial and holistic understanding of the historical process and of its periodization.² Striving to emancipate itself from both the academic hegemony of (Hegelian) philosophy and the legacy of court historiography (which had previously monopolized the creation of great historical narratives), historiography à la Ranke continued to bear the signs of both in its insistence on the singularity and unity of historical epochs. The quest to uncover the Zeitgeist and Triebkraft (the driving force) of every epoch in history was a defining feature of debates around periodization during the 19th century. Even “rebellious” approaches to “the historical process” such as Karl Lamprecht’s Kulturgeschichte or the historical materialism originating in Marxist circles were based on the same homogenizing view of historical periods: though they challenged the specific criteria underlying the common periodization of human history, they did not question the coherence of the “historical process” in itself. Of course, this tendency was not unique to professional historiography. Indeed, one of the most influential scientific projects of the 19th century, positivism, was also based on a holistic vision of history.³ Nevertheless, from the fin de siècle

 L. Ranke, Über die Epochen der neueren Geschichte (München & Wien, 1971), pp. 53 – 67.  Even though Ranke opposed Hegelian monism, his religious idea of “God behind history” made his vision of history a holistic one. Having rejected the linear understanding of history promoted by Hegel, Ranke still insisted on the unity of historical epochs as stages in the development of the “germs and natural tendencies” (Keime und Anlagen) within each individual. See G. G. Iggers, “The Image of Ranke in American and German Historical Thought”, History and Theory, 2/1 (1962), pp. 35 – 36.  Even when the “scientific mysticism” peculiar to the founder of positivism, Auguste Comte, was shed by his followers, a stadial and cohesive view of history would remain a characteristic trait of the positivist programme. These features were typical also for “non-European” responses https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636000-006

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onwards, there arose new intellectual movements which would draw attention to the plurality of simultaneously existing “historical processes” and thereby question the basic idea of the historical process’ homogeneity. Thus, for example, anthropology and ethnography (both in its racist and anti-racist variants) would accumulate an ever-greater amount of scientific data on non-European cultures, deeply influencing all of the humanities at the turn of the 20th century in the process.⁴ Homogeneous visions of history would be made even more problematic by the experience of the world wars which delivered a heavy blow to Eurocentrism in the European intellectual world. The discrediting of German academia due to the Nazi affiliations of many of its representatives also indirectly contributed to this process, by enabling the French “Annales school” to become one of the leaders of professional historiography. The Annales historians’ interest in the historiographies of the Socialist bloc⁵ combined with their freedom from dogmatic Marxism⁶ made them ideal mediators between different historiographical tendencies and, at the same time, increased their academic audience. Besides dealing yet another blow – with some inspiration from anthropology – to the homogeneous vision of history, the Annales school also led the way in challenging the dominance of high politics within historical writing. This challenge drew the attention of many professional historians and lent renewed salience to the critique of political history in historiographical discussion, not least in debates over periodization. The cultural history approach and history of mentalities promoted by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre respectively, as well as the “total approach” to histo the positivist programme. For more see J. Feichtinger, F. L. Fillafer, J. Surman (eds), The Worlds of Positivism: A Global Intellectual History, 1770 – 1930 (London, 2018).  G. H. Penny, M. Bunzl and A. Arbor (eds), Worldly Provincialism. German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor, 2003); B. Rathmayr, Die Frage nach den Menschen. Eine historische Anthropologie der Anthropologien (Opladen, 2013).  See, for example, E. Cinnella, Georges Lefebvre et l’historiographie soviétique de la Révolution française, Cahiers de l’Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française, 2, mai 2010. URL : http://lrf. revues.org/index154.html (accessed 28 May 2020); S. Cœuré, “Économie-monde et civilisation russe selon Fernand Braudel. Un dialogue entre historiens français et soviétiques”, Revue de Synthèse, 139 (2018), pp. 9 – 36. Of course, historians from the Socialist bloc also had a great interest in the Annales school, which for many represented a “window to Europe” in terms of theory. For more on these contacts and the mutual interest between historians from different sides of the “Iron Curtain”, see K. Pomian, “Impact of the Annales School in Eastern Europe”, Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economics, Historical Systems, and Civilizations, 1/3 – 4 (1978), pp. 101– 118.  Though some of the key Annales figures did have a certain interest in Marxism. See P. Pleskot, “Marxism in the Historiography of ‘Annales’ in the Opinion of its Creators and Critics”, Acta Poloniae Historica, 96 (2007), pp. 183 – 205.

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tory championed by Fernand Braudel, clearly invoked alternative principles of periodization. At the same time, French historians’ desire to play an active role in the public sphere led them into constant conflict with historical narratives promoted by governmental institutions and “traditionalist historians”.⁷ Such challenges notwithstanding, at the level of historiographical practice, there was no easy alternative to the traditional way of systematizing teaching in schools, specializations in historical departments, and how historical knowledge was presented in the public sphere. Consequently, history would continue being organized in accordance with “great political events” and the reigns of “great political figures”. This approach to periodization would remain much more visible in societies dominated by statist historical narratives where historiography is closely connected to the idea of “national history”. The convenience of political periodization, with its references to familiar temporal categories learned in school, makes it an effective medium through which a common language can be found with the wider audience of historical literature. For this reason, the interest that is currently shown in issues of periodization is, in my view, more a reaction by different subdisciplines within professional historiography to the dominance of governmental and statist logics in the public representation of the past than an internal quarrel amongst historians. However, far from making this renewed engagement with periodization a case of “tilting at windmills”, the public stakes involved only serve to underscore the relevance of the issue. Intellectual history is one of those research fields which most habitually cross established chronological borders. This is due to the peculiar properties of its source base and research questions. The historian Stefan Collini would wittily begin a paper entitled The Identity of Intellectual History by stating that: “Intellectual history has no identity”.⁸ Indeed, if the purely philosophical “chain of being” of Arthur Lovejoy,⁹ the philosophical and socio-historical Begriffsgeschichte of Reinhart Koselleck,¹⁰ the linguistic and philological contextualism of Quentin Skinner,¹¹ and Christopher Charle’s social history of intellectuals¹²  See: J. Le Goff, “Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?”, Daedalus Historical Studies Today, 100/1 (1971), pp. 1– 19.  S. Collini, “The Identity of Intellectual History”, in R. Whatmore and B. Young (eds), A Companion to Intellectual History (Malden MA, 2016), p. 7.  A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge MA, 2009 [1936]).  See R. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts Cultural memory in the present, trans. T. S. Presner (Redwood City, 2002).  E. g. R. Lamb, “Recent Developments in the Thought of Quentin Skinner and the Ambitions of Contextualism”, Journal of the Philosophy of History 3 (2009), pp. 246– 65.  E. g. C. Charle, Les Intellectuels en Europe au xixe siècle (Paris, 1996).

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have anything in common except their association with the intellectual history label, it is the temporal logic determined by how they approach sources and by the nature of their research subject, which allows for a plurality of simultaneously existing “historical processes”. In general, the peculiarity of intellectual history’s approach to temporality can be explained by its focus on the internal intellectual worlds of its protagonists. In contrast to the narrative logic of political history according to which political events change “reality”, dividing history into “before” and “after” stages, intellectual historians regard political changes as merely external factors in relation to their true subject matter. Political events matter only insofar as they become the basis for intellectuals’ personal experiences and the subject of their reflections.¹³ This approach makes change a more complex issue, since intellectuals experiencing political changes react to them on the basis of beliefs and convictions rooted in their previous experiences and intellectual traditions. This means that some aspects of their “intellectual reaction” to the world change under the influence of the current moment while others remain unchangeable. For public intellectuals,¹⁴ the previous opinions they have expressed, the arguments of their opponents, and the intellectual heritage of relevant thinkers from the more or less distant past shape a special space of references which is only partly altered by changing political conditions. Through their writings, public intellectuals are able to shape their own “worlds made by words”¹⁵ – worlds with their own borders and temporal categories which for the intellectuals in question are sometimes even more real than their geographical and astronomical equivalents. Intellectuals who see themselves as part of large movements such as Marxism or Social Catholicism develop their understanding of the “current moment” by drawing on the ideologies of their respective movements. Indeed, these ideologies to some extent shape their experience of time and historicity.¹⁶ For the researcher, it follows that interpreting texts written by intellectuals in a chosen period requires much more than just a knowledge of sources from the period in

 Of course, this is true not only for intellectual history. As was said, each of the research fields within history is in its own state of tension with statist narratives derived from political history.  In this chapter, terms such as “public intellectuals” or “intellectuals” have no normative connotations and simply refer to people participating in public debates.  This phrase was used by Anthony Grafton to refer to the community of early modern scholars. See A. Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge MS, 2009).  For more on the “regimes of historicity” concept, see: F. Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism), trans. S. Brown (New York, 2015).

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question. Crucially, since membership in different political camps and intellectual groups implies subscribing to different concepts of the historical process and to different understandings of “the current moment”, in any given historical moment there are bound to be multiple “visions of temporality” coexisting in the public sphere. Obviously, such a temporal fragmentation of the public sphere proves much more problematic under those regimes which attempt to expand their control over all segments of public life. Mid-20th-century Poland – the setting for the present study – was a society subject to precisely these dynamics. Censorship, secret service surveillance, and political regulation of the public display of ideas were already present in Poland – as in most countries – in the interwar period. Nevertheless, such manifestations of governmental control over public life would dramatically intensify and take on new forms in the decade after 1939 when Poland was invaded, occupied and partially annexed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Of greatest relevance to the present chapter are the political changes that followed in the wake of the Red Army’s advance into Poland in 1944. The eastern territories of the interwar Polish republic were definitively annexed by the Soviet Union; the government-in-exile was prevented from returning; and the leaders of the Home Army, which had directed most anti-Nazi resistance in the Polish territories, were arrested and taken to Moscow to be put on trial. Most importantly, the Soviet victory in 1945 cleared the way for the spread of the “Soviet model”, giving the Soviet government an opportunity to determine the path of state-building in all of East-Central Europe. Indeed, the new statebuilding process in Poland would be headed by the “Polish Committee of National Liberation” (also known as the Lublin Government) created under Soviet control. These political changes directly influenced the limits of what was considered “acceptable” in political, cultural, and academic discourse; meanwhile, censorship became the main instrument through which governmental institutions controlled the public display of ideas. Nevertheless, the peculiarities of the Polish socio-political context would render the public limits of what was discursively “acceptable” after 1945 much broader relative to the USSR, albeit in constant flux. Given the dramatic political transformation that occurred in 1944– 5, it is understandable that this has been treated as a key point in the periodization of Polish history. For once, the dominance of a political caesura appears warranted. Nevertheless, examining the main ideas which shaped how different intellectual groups interpreted the new post-war world opens another perspective on how the post-war years could be periodized. In this chapter, I will attempt to offer such a perspective by examining the activity of three groups of intellectuals, each of which became a key player in Polish public life following the Second

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World War. The first of these groups was a collective of left-wing intellectuals gathered around the cultural journal Kuźnica, who enjoyed strong governmental support in the war’s immediate aftermath. The second group was a Catholic collective based around the journal Tygodnik Warszawski, led by the priest Zygmunt Kaczyński, a high-ranking member of the interwar Catholic hierarchy in Poland. Finally, the third case I will consider is the group headed by the charismatic figure Bolesław Piasecki, former leader of the most radical branch of the ultranationalist National Democratic (endek) movement, and founder of PAX, a postwar organization of “secular Catholics”. On the surface, my chapter will respect the standard caesuras of Polish history, beginning its story in 1944 – 1945. Nevertheless, the aim of this chapter is to explore another temporal perspective on post-war debates, showing that the political and cultural programmes of key debate participants were deeply rooted in their previous, pre-war and wartime intellectual experiences. These previous experiences determined how intellectuals differed in their understandings of the post-war world and in the strategies they undertook in response to new conditions. In contrast to existing historiography, I will not concentrate on how the activities of intellectuals related to the larger “ideological camps” – be it Marxism, nationalism or Catholicism – to which they belonged,¹⁷ though this contextual perspective will still play a role in my narrative. It is also not my aim to examine the manifestations of different “temporal regimes” related to historiographical topoi such as “romanticism” or “modernism” in the public discourse of intellectuals.¹⁸ Rather, the purpose of this chapter is to show how the “basic ideas” promoted by each of these three groups which coexisted in the same time and space could be periodized differently, if we analysed them from the “internal” perspective of each group’s intellectual and experiential past. For this reason, it is not a set of abstract ideological labels (such as Marxism or Catholicism), but the concrete political and intellectual experiences of each group’s members, that will be the focus of this chapter. It will be shown how political events – the core organizing structure of “traditional” periodization – played a fundamentally different role in the intellectual histories of each group. Under the term “basic ideas”, I will refer to those ideas relating to socio-political ideals and possible political strategies. It will be shown how

 For this perspective on Polish intellectual history, see: M. Shore, Caviar and Ashes. A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918 – 1968 (New Haven, 2006); P. Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891 – 1956 (New Haven, 2018).  Such a project was undertaken by D. Mishkova, B. Trencsényi and M. Jalava (eds),“Regimes of Historicity” in Southeastern and Northern Europe, 1890 – 1945: Discourses of Identity and Temporality (Berlin, 2014).

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the war, which became a key event for the intellectual development of the Kuźnica group, did not constitute a watershed in how the basic ideas of Kaczyński’s associates developed, but did become an important factor in Bolesław Piasecki’s decision to translate his pre-war ideas to fit post-war conditions.

I From café intellectuals to official ideologues To clarify the context which set the parameters for post-war public debates in Poland, it is necessary to consider the key political decisions that determined postwar political developments in this country. After coming into conflict with the Polish government-in-exile in 1943, Stalin would decide to create an alternative political body for Poland.¹⁹ As an unsuccessful Soviet commander during the Polish–Soviet War (1919 – 1921) and an instigator of the 1930s repressions of Poles (deemed “hostile elements”) in the Soviet Union, Stalin fully understood the antipathy towards communism among the Polish people. Indeed, in 1943 it was Stalin’s idea to organize the alternative political body he envisaged for Poland around an ideological framework that was broad enough to include nonMarxist “progressives”. This organization would be called the “Union of Polish Patriots” and became the first Polish institution on Soviet territory to attract Poles to Stalin’s political programme. The end of the war brought some autonomy to Polish governmental institutions, which hoped to realize the general guidelines proposed by the Soviet government in their own manner.²⁰ The pressure on the new Polish government to establish a modus vivendi with the Polish people, many of whom held non-communist or anti-communist views, enabled individual party functionaries to create the institutions which would make public debates in the post-war Polish state possible.²¹ One of the key organizers of the “cultural field” in post-war Poland was the communist Polish Workers’ Party functionary, Jerzy Borejsza  The conflict was provoked by the Nazis’ discovery of mass graves containing the remains of Polish officers executed by the Soviets in Katyń. For more on how this conflict was seen by Stalin dialogue between Stalin and the husband of Wanda Wasilewska concerning this conflict, see [n/ a], “Wspomnienia Wandy Wasilewskiej 1939 – 1944”, Archiwum Ruchu Robotniczego, 2 (1980), p. 383.  For more on the limits of Soviet control over the activity of the Polish government, see P. Babiracki, Soviet Soft Power in Poland Culture and the Making of Stalin’s New Empire, 1943 – 1957 (Chapel Hill, 2015), pp. 15 – 51.  Indeed, in what was another sign of the communists’ anxiety to win public consent, the state retained the historical name of the Polish Republic (Rzeczpospolita Polska) until 1952, only then being rebaptised as the People’s Republic of Poland.

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(1905 – 1952).²² Borejsza was among the most ardent propagators of the new postwar order, apparently believing in the possibility of building socialism in Poland without the need for violence. To promote his project of “gentle revolution”, Borejsza strove to establish a dialogue with non-communist and even Catholic writers and scholars who not only belonged to very different political camps, but also had had various experiences during the war.²³ In Borejsza’s project, allowing for public debates in cultural journals was a way of signalling political tolerance for wide-ranging discussion of numerous topics in the new Polish state. At the same time, by creating a cultural press, Borejsza hoped to generate professional and financial incentives for famous writers and scholars from the interwar period to participate in moulding the new state’s “intellectual profile”. One of the milieux to flourish most under Borejsza’s patronage was the first of the three groups examined in this chapter, the Kuźnica circle. The roots of this group lay in the journal Odrodzenie (“Rebirth”), established in 1944 for intellectuals willing to heed the appeals of the Soviet-sponsored Lublin Government. Odrodzenie was a centrepiece of Borejsza’s “gentle revolution” strategy and later became a “favourite child” of the “Pope of the Press”, as Borejsza came to be known.²⁴ Right from its foundation, the journal included articles by writers and scholars associated with different interwar intellectual movements, including Catholic activists.²⁵ At the radical end of the spectrum of forces united under Odrodzenie’s banner were the intellectuals who later formed the core of the Kuźnica group. In the summer of 1945, these intellectuals published the first separate issue of Kuźnica (“The Hammer Forge” – a telling title in itself). Based in the industrial city of Łódź, which became an “alternative capital” to Warsaw fol-

 For more about his role in the post-war Polish press, see E. Krasucki, Międzynarodowy komunista. Jerzy Borejsza. Biografia polityczna (Warszawa, 2009), p. 107. For more about the structure of the corporation “The Reader” (Czytelnik) which was created by Borejsza, see AAN, Ministerstwo informacji i propagandy, Sygn. 180. Sprawozdanie z działalności Spółdzielni “Czytelnik”. K. 1, 2.  For more about his project see J. Borejsza, “Rewolucja łagodna”, Odrodzenie, 10 – 12 (1945), p. 1. The “gentle revolution” concept referred to how the Constitution of 3 May 1791 was understood in the Polish historiographic tradition. See A. Wierzbicki, Konstytucja 3 Maja w historiografii polskiej (Warszawa, 1993); A. Ostrowski, “Hugo Kołłątaj i łagodnia rewolucja 1791”, Kuźnica, 4– 5 (1945), pp. 11– 13.  In striving to become an éminence grise in state-run publishing institutions (according to the Polish writer and communist activist Jerzy Putrament), Borejsza earned this nickname due to his significant role in censorship and propaganda. Krasucki, Międzynarodowy komunista, p. 107.  See H. Gosk, W kręgu “Kuźnicy”: dyskusje krytycznoliterackie lat 1945 – 1948 (Łódź, 1985), p. 59 – 60.

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lowing the latter’s destruction,²⁶ the Kuźnica journal was, from its first appearance, symbolic of a radical cultural programme for a post-war Poland rising from the ruins.²⁷ Marxist literary critics Stefan Żółkiewski and Jan Kott, as well as Polish writers Zofia Nałkowska and Mieczysław Jastrun, were among the most notable members of the first editorial board of the journal.²⁸ All of them had belonged to the socialist milieus of interwar Poland, milieus characterized by strong French sympathies and a deep engagement with the cultural life of Paris and Warsaw. Before the war they had acted more as “café intellectuals”, interested in critical social theory and guided by extremely heterodox Marxist sympathies. To give a flavour of their eclecticism, on the eve of the war Żółkiewski would write from Warsaw to Kott, who was staying in Paris at the time: “I am almost a Thomist. I am reading the Summa [Theologiae] the whole time and getting angry. It is perfectly done. It has no holes. Like a sphere of Parmenides. But there is no Marxian humour in it.”²⁹ This ironic style captures the tone of discussions taking place amongst these intellectuals at a time when they had no access to power and stood in radical opposition to the interwar regime created by Józef Pilsudski.³⁰ The experience of the war, which most of the organizers of Kuźnica spent in the General Governorate (i. e., the part of Poland that was under Nazi occupation from 1939), increased these intellectuals’ engagement with Communism. Nevertheless, for the most part they were not directly associated with the Soviet version of Marxist ideology in its strictest or most Soviet form. For example, Jan Kott received his basic training in the Soviet catechism in a Polish, rather than purely Soviet, cultural environment, that is, in the city of Lwów following its occupation by the Soviets in 1939. Kott’s excursion into Soviet Marxism was supervised by Polish communist intellectuals gathered around the pro-Soviet writer Wanda Wasilewska. Wasilewska organized a working space for Polish writers “under the portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and Mickiewicz”,³¹ with the presence of  Gosk, W kręgu “Kuźnicy”, p. 50.  See Z. Żabicki, “Kuźnica” i jej program literacki (Warszawa, 1966).  H. Gosk, W kręgu “Kuźnicy”, pp. 30 – 32.  J. Kott, Przyczynek do biografii. Zawał serca (Kraków, 1995), p. 29.  For more on the cultural atmosphere that prevailed among these “café intellectuals” see Shore, Caviar and Ashes, pp. 10 – 51. Among other things, Shore describes in detail the experiences of intellectuals who were arrested for their communist convictions in the interwar period.  Adam Mickiewicz (1798 – 1855) was one of the most famous Polish-language poets, a totemic figure in the Polish national pantheon. Of course, the real Mickiewicz had no connection to Marxism, but his appearance alongside Lenin and Stalin was indicative of how the Stalinist approach to cultural affairs was being translated into the language of Polish culture. Unlike the

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Mickiewicz in this triptych signalling the Polonisation of Stalinism. Following the Nazi assault on the USSR, however, Jan Kott did not retreat into the Soviet interior alongside intellectuals like Wasilewska, but instead returned to Warsaw where Stefan Żółkiewski, along with other left-wing intellectuals, was already “deeply immersed in the Communist underground”.³² The underground life of occupied Poland was diverse. There were communists and nationalists, Catholics and atheists competing under the banner of the anti-Nazi struggle. Additionally, a system of underground education was put in place in the General Governorate, thereby continuing the tradition of “intellectual resistance” to the “Germanisation” and “Russification” policies pursued by the Polish lands’ Prussian and Russian rulers in the late 19th century.³³ Since both Kott and Żółkiewski saw themselves as literary critics, the study of Polish literature became their specialization within underground academic circles. The wartime “Polish studies circle” (Koło polonistów) to which both Kott and Żółkiewski belonged became a platform for discussions about Marxism and the Polish “rationalist tradition”. The community that formed around it would also constitute the core of the later Kuźnica editorial crew. As a result of their wartime biographies, the future Kuźnica leaders who had lived through the occupation in Warsaw greeted the Soviet troops and the Lublin government with a limited comprehension of the Soviet system, but a strong faith in their own radical cultural programme.³⁴ The liberation of Poland in 1944 – and the simultaneous establishment of Odrodzenie – led to a radical change in these figures’ public status, transforming them from “café intellectuals” and underground combatants into the architects of the pro-governmental cultural programme for the entire country. The ideological agenda promoted by Kuźnica was based on the perception of a fundamental discontinuity between the political, cultural and educational conditions in interwar and post-war Poland. According to this programme, the changes brought about after 1944 created an opportunity to move from “eclectic stagnation [and] mystical, pessimistic or elitist escapism” to positive and pro-

cultural reformers of the early Soviet period, Stalin resurrected a form of official propaganda based on “the great figures of the past”, who were now rebaptised as “progressive thinkers”. As a Polish “progressive thinker”, Mickiewicz was meant to become a Polish equivalent to the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799 – 1837), who played a central role in Stalinist cultural propaganda.  J. Kott, Przyczynek do biografii, p. 103.  ’For more on the underground activity of Polish scholars see F. Cain, Wissen im Untergrund Praxis und Politik klandestiner Forschung im besetzten Polen (1939 – 1945) (Tübingen, 2021).  For more about this period, see the memoirs of Jan Kott: Kott, Przyczynek do biografii, p. 41– 121.

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gressive cultural development. The crucial task that the editorial board saw itself performing for the “new Poland” was that of “rais[ing] new strata of the intelligentsia” from the workers’ and peasants’ midst and “bind[ing] them to the progressive and radical achievements of our centuries-old culture”.³⁵ This programmatic statement reflected an ambition to rethink the role of literature, science, and scholarship and ensure they would serve current social needs. Thus, the post-war years had to become the starting point for a new chapter in Polish history. Whilst references to concepts like Marxism or, even more so, communism were reduced to a minimum in the public discourse of the state-run press, the Kuźnica collective made no effort to hide the Marxist roots of its post-war programme. If anything, its association with this methodological and ideological tendency gave it a determination to combat the “anti-Marxist stereotypes” which dominated Polish intellectual landscape before, during and, indeed, after the war. In their endless debate with Catholics³⁶ as well as in general methodological essays, Kuźnica leaders strove to promote the trivial representation of Marxism as nothing more than the “scientific view of things”.³⁷ More importantly, their Marxism³⁸ played a central role in shaping the premises of their cultural programme: their belief in the fundamental discontinuity between pre- and postwar Poland, for instance, grew out of the Marxist axiom positing that social-political conditions, based in their turn on economic relations, determine the path of cultural development. According to this idea, the war and subsequent Soviet liberation of Poland broke the economic and social contradictions between different classes that interwar Poland had been built on and created conditions for the implementation of a “progressive” political and cultural programme.³⁹ Thus, Marxism provided the theoretical explanation for the fundamental changes in Poland’s political structure and justified the new periodization of its history. Nevertheless, the break with the social-political conditions of the past did not mean the radical denial of the Polish tradition in its entirety. Key figures

 See the manifesto of the journal Kuźnica 1 (1945), p.1.  For more on the key arguments in this discussion, see A. M. Lokhmatov, “Pol’skaia katolicheskaia intelligentsiia i ideologiia marksizma: Stanovlenie “otnoshenii” (1945 – 1948)”, in S. Rafaluk (ed), Clio-science: Problemy istorii i mezhdistsiplinarnogo sinteza: Sbornik nauchnyh trudov (Moskva, 2016), vol. VII, pp. 186—193.  E. g., S. Żółkiewski, “O tak zwanej nieaktualności Marksizmu”, Kuźnica 1 (1945), pp. 2– 4.  It is worth mentioning that their Marxism, at least at this stage, had little to do with the “Soviet Marxism” which dominated Soviet science (though the term “Soviet Marxism” is in itself problematic).  E. g. J. Borejsza, “Nieurojona suwerenność”, Kuźnica 4– 5 (1945), pp. 15 – 17.

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in Polish intellectual history were called upon to attest to the “progressiveness” of the programme promoted by Kuźnica. Pride of place in this genealogy was offered to Adam Mickiewicz, represented as a thinker blessed with a “radical attitude” and “progressive views”. Alongside the world-famous name of Mickiewicz, Enlightenment thinkers would also start being wheeled out in the public discourse of the left-wing press to deliver legitimacy to its radical social programme. Stanisław Konarski, Hugo Kołłątaj, Stanisław Staszic⁴⁰ and other Polish Enlightenment thinkers were cast as the “realists” of the 18th century, while “realism”, which was redefined – in unusually broad fashion – as “social utility”, became an important criterion for demarcating “progressive” and “reactionary” ideas. Remarkably, even Romantic thinkers were annexed to the ranks of Polish “realists” following this redefinition. Thus, Mieczysław Jastrun, Kuźnica’s vice-editor, wrote in one of his articles: “In occupied Warsaw, one could read, with trepidation, Mickiewicz, Homer, the Psalms of Kochanowski, Norwid, and some works of Słowacki, but the poems of most symbolists and late stylists could not be read. It was possible to find help in the works of the first [group of poets]; the others did not seem convincing. They did not pass the hardest exam. They were useless.”⁴¹ The Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski,⁴² the father of Polish messianism Adam Mickiewicz, the mystic Juliusz Słowacki⁴³, and the Romantic Cyprian Norwid⁴⁴ were well-accepted in the new order not only because of their artistic skills but also, more importantly, because of their “usefulness”. Thus, besides enabling the ascendancy of the Kuźnica circle’s socialist ideals, the years after 1945 also created the socio-political conditions for the most “progressive” and “useful” ideas of earlier Polish history to be brought to the fore.

 Stanisław Konarski (1700 – 1773), Hugo Kołłątaj (1750 – 1812), and Stanisław Staszic (1755 – 1826) were key figures in the Polish Enlightenment. Besides occupying important positions in the Church hierarchy (Konarski was a monk, whilst Kołłątaj and Staszic were priests), each of them was central to educational reforms in Poland. What is more, they all advocated the centralization of the Polish state at the late 18th century and fought against the privileges of the nobility (szlachta).  M. Jastrun, “Poza rzeczywistością historyczną”, Kuźnica 1 (1945), p. 16.  Jan Kochanowski (1530 – 1584) was one of the most famous Polish-language poets of the Renaissance. He played a crucial role in the formation of the Polish literary language.  Juliusz Słowacki (1809 – 1849) was one of the key representatives of Romanticism and, alongside Mickiewicz, one of the most canonical figures in Polish literature.  Cyprian Norwid (1821– 1883) was a Polish poet and writer. His works were largely unknown during his lifetime. Nevertheless, thanks to the efforts of the “Young Poland” (Młoda Polska) modernist artistic movement active between 1890 and 1918, Norwid’s writings acquired widespread fame and popularity in the Polish lands, turning him into an important symbol for the national independence movement.

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This flexible approach to Polish intellectual heritage gave Kuźnica intellectuals a lot of latitude to repurpose the heroes of the past as sources of legitimacy for their political and cultural programme in the present. Those views espoused by past heroes which fitted Kuźnica’s current agenda were foregrounded, while those of their ideas that could be classed as “reactionary” were explained as products of the historical and social situation in which they had lived. Since the programme promoted by Marxists implied reliance on the authority of science, the Kuźnica group justified the distinction they drew between “relevant” and “outdated” ideas as a “historical” and “sociological” view of things. To fully implement the “most progressive ideas” of the Polish past – ideas that had supposedly been prevented from flourishing under the pre-1939 ancien régime – demanded significant changes in political strategy from the Kuźnica intellectuals. Besides continuing their critique of “bourgeois culture”, they also had to learn to speak from a dominant position. Put differently, shifting from a position of pre-war powerlessness to one of post-war power also entailed a discursive shift away from criticism towards the construction of a “positive” programme. Thus, in Kuźnica discourse, the “progressive” intellectual was endowed with certain traits of Bolshevik vanguardism. Emphasis was placed on the need for a leading group of “professionals” to direct changes “from above”. It was incumbent on those elements within the “educated intelligentsia” which possessed the “right views” to familiarize the “broad peasant and worker layers of the population” with the “progressive tradition” in Polish and European thought and to cultivate “the new intelligentsia [arising] from the workers and the peasants”.⁴⁵ Developing the idea of a cultural and literary policy planned and governed from above, Stefan Żółkiewski wrote in one of his publications: “[under the old regime] the fact that the material means of literary production were owned by the private capitalist shaped literature and subjected it to the class interests of reaction. Our principal task is not only to obtain these means of production for the writer…The reconstruction of our culture must have a planned character.”⁴⁶ Later, Żółkiewski developed this idea in a more general and theoretical article discussing, among other things, the issue of artificial freedom: “The postulate of the creative freedom of the artist introduces a lot of ambiguity in the practice of contemporary cultural policy…First of all, the freedom of the artist is not a sociological fact … The only sociological fact which is available for ex-

 This idea was closely connected to the people’s university programme, see A. Zysiak, Punkty za pochodzenie. Powojenna modernizacja i uniwersytet w robotniczym mieście (Kraków, 2016).  S. Żółkiewski, “W sprawie organizacji życia literackiego”, Odrodzenie, 4– 5 (1944), p. 8.

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amination are the changeable historical conditions of the artist”.⁴⁷ Thus, the post-war period represented an opportunity for the artistic world to reject the deceptive concept of artistic freedom and to take advantage of its newfound independence from capitalist constraints. From late 1947, as the Cold War began to escalate, growing pressure from the Soviet Union would force the rollback of the “gentle revolution” project.⁴⁸ Both Jerzy Borejsza and Stefan Żółkiewski were forced to repent publicly for their “misconducts” in the early post-war period. Borejsza criticized himself for “liberalism in relation to the snobbish intelligentsia and for having allowed pseudoMarxist voices into the press”,⁴⁹ while Żółkiewski recognized the “erroneous tendency” that manifested itself in Kuźnica in the form of “overestimation of Western inventions and underestimation of the achievements of the Soviet Union”.⁵⁰ A year later, both Kuźnica and Odrodzenie were closed and, in their place, a new journal entitled Nowa Kultura was established with the purpose of remoulding cultural and literary discourse along socialist realist lines. Some members of the Kuźnica group continued their work in the institutions created during “Stalinization” and, after 1956, made a successful political career under the post-Stalinist regime.⁵¹ Others started to promote an anti-authoritarian version of socialism and became opponents of the regime.⁵² Nevertheless, for all of them – regardless of their subsequent trajectories – the end of World War II had represented a radical caesura which brought them from the margins of public life to the centre – even if temporarily – of the political scene.

 S. Żółkiewski, “Uwagi o polityce kulturalnej”, Kuźnica, 27 (1947), p. 1.  In late 1947 the Soviet government, in the person of Andrei Zhdanov, made it clear that “liberal biases” in the politics of Communist parties would not be tolerated. See G. M. Adibekov, Soveshhanija Kominforma 1947, 1948, 1949. Dokumenty i materialy (Moskva, 1998), p. 300.  [n/a], “Przemówienie tow. Borejszy”, Nowe Drogi, 11 (1948), pp. 124– 125.  [n/a], “Przemówienie tow. Żółkiewskiego”, Nowe Drogi, 11 (1948), p. 106.  For example, Stefan Żółkiewski became one of the leading figures in the process of “Stalinization” of Polish literary studies and, later, Minister of Higher Education (1956 – 1959). Many years later, Żółkiewski denied the connection between Kuźnica and the “Stalinization” process (S. Żółkiewski, “Sur l’exemple de l’hebdomadaire ’Kuźnica’”, Acta Poloniae Historica, 31 (1975), p. 188 – 189). He assured his readers that he had ceased publishing his essays under the “unpleasant conditions” of cultural Stalinism (S. Żółkiewski, Cetno i licho: Szkice 1938 – 1980 (Warszawa, 1983), p. 6). Nevertheless, having (temporally) lost his position as a journal editor, Żółkiewski did not cease to be an organizer of cultural politics under Stalinism (P. Knap (ed), Wokół zjazdu szczecińskiego 1949 r. (Szczecin, 2016)).  After embracing his role as one of Stalinism’s main promoters in the cultural realm, Jan Kott became an active member of the opposition after 1956, quitting the Polish United Workers’ Party in 1957 before later emigrating from Poland. (J. Kott, Przyczynek do biografii, pp. 265 – 321).

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II Social Catholicism Unrepentant The next group to be considered is the intellectual circle concentrated around the Catholic journal Tygodnik Warszawski (“The Warsaw Weekly”), which also became a significant actor in post-war public discussions. The first issue of this journal came out at the end of 1945. Its establishment followed a request from the Catholic hierarchy to the chancellor of the Metropolitan curia Zygmunt Choromański asking that he create a milieu in which “Catholic views” could be represented in post-war Poland.⁵³ However, the journal assumed a more important role after the priest and former parliamentary deputy Zygmunt Kaczyński (1894 – 1953) became editor-in-chief following his return from exile in England. Kaczyński’s political clout turned the journal into an active participant in Polish political life whose influence extended beyond Catholic circles. As will be shown, Kaczyński’s previous intellectual and political experiences played a fundamental role in determining both the strategy that this group pursued after the war and, more generally, its understanding of the post-war moment and its relationship to the past. Kaczyński was born in Warsaw and, as a young man, entered the seminary. Since Warsaw was then a part of the Russian Empire, he continued his education in Petrograd at the Catholic Spiritual Academy. It was here that he witnessed the fall of the Romanovs. After the October Revolution of 1917, Kaczyński returned to Warsaw and immersed himself in politics. In 1919, he was elected as one of the youngest members of the Polish Diet and in 1930 he was appointed to head the Catholic Press Agency (Katolicka Agencja Prasowa, KAP).After joining the Christian-Democratic Party in the 1920s, in 1937 he would be among the founders of the Labour Party (Stronnictwo Pracy) which represented a branch of Polish Christian Democracy. When the war began, Kaczyński joined the Civil Defence Committee and was wounded in combat. In autumn 1939 he left Poland to escape Gestapo persecution, heading to the Vatican with the intention of informing the Pope about the situation in Poland before Joachim von Ribbentrop paid an official visit to the Holy See. After coming to London, Kaczyński became the Minister of Religions and Public Enlightenment in the Polish government-in-exile.⁵⁴

 See M. Biełaszko, “”Tygodnik Warszawski” i jego środowisko (1945 – 1948) “, Biuletyn IPN, 4/ 75 (2007), p. 77.  K. Śliwak, “Activities of priest Zygmunt Kaczynski– Minister of Religious Affairs and Public Education in the government in-exile (1943 – 1945)”, Przegląd Historyczno-Oświatowy, 3 – 4 (2016), pp. 196 – 208.

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Thus, Kaczyński returned to Poland as a seasoned politician with extensive administrative experience and an image of himself as an embodiment of political and historical continuity with interwar Poland – a notion supported and guaranteed by Stalin, who promised to protect the interests of the Catholic Church.⁵⁵ Kaczyński came to Poland with the intention of promoting his basic ideas under the conditions proposed by the Soviet government. Immediately after his arrival in Warsaw, Kaczyński attracted many scholars and writers to publishing and Catholic activism, organizing public lectures in history, politics, economics, and theology by Catholic scholars who shared his interwar political values.⁵⁶ Among the figures supported by Kaczyński were the leaders of the resurrected Labour Party, which resumed its activities in 1944– 5 but had disbanded by 1946 after the Polish security services engineered a split within the party.⁵⁷ Despite such signals of mounting authoritarianism, Kaczyński’s faith in the guarantees offered by Stalin led his group to pursue the most radical line possible in its ideological struggle against the Polish communists. The political and cultural programme of the Warsaw Catholics was based on the conviction that “the Catholic Church is a serious force and cannot help but fight for the right to participate in the political life of the country”.⁵⁸ This conviction led the group to aspire to an active role in contemporary politics. According to Tygodnik Warszawski, the “people’s democracy” project promoted by the new Polish authorities in no way contradicted the Warsaw Catholics’ intentions of representing the interests of Poland’s social majority.⁵⁹ What is more, drawing on their experience as active participants in interwar debates between Catholics and socialists, the Warsaw Catholics reproduced the familiar patterns of these earlier debates, framing the new ideological competition in military terms. In a characteristic example, one young writer for Tygodnik Warszawski would write about how compromises in matters relating to the Catholic worldview “could be understood by opponents as a sign of weakness, [meaning that] Catholics have no right to retreat in this

 T. Volokitina (ed), Vostochnaja Evropa v dokumentah rossijskih arhivov: 1944 – 1953 gg (Novosibirsk, 1997), vol. I, pp. 457– 459.  A. Friszke, Między wojną a więzieniem. 1945 – 1953. Młoda inteligencja katolicka (Warszawa, 2015), p. 126.  See W. Bujak, Historia Storonnictwa Pracy 1937 – 1946 – 1950 (Warszawa, 1988).  [n/a], “Katolicyzm spoleczny a polityczny”, Tygodnik Warszawski, 25 (1946), p. 5.  E. g. S. Kisielewski, “Krytykom Kościoła”, Tygodnik Warszawski, 30 (1946), p. 2.; T.N. Grabowski, “U źródła nowożytnej demokracji”, Tygodnik Warszawski, 34/41 (1946), p.1; K. Turowski, “O pracy i ustroju społecznym”, Tygodnik Warszawski, 44 (1946), p.3.; J.M. Święcicki, “Demokracja a obyczaje”, Tygodnik Warszawski, 128 (1946), p. 2.

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battle”.⁶⁰ Thus, the continued struggle against their old opponents became a leitmotif in the public discourse of the Warsaw Catholics. Of the Catholic collectives which chose to participate in post-war public debates, the group centred around Kaczyński was the only one to be headed by a seasoned politician and also to engage in active struggle against the communists rather than looking for a compromise with the new political order.⁶¹ The social programme promoted by the group did not radically change after the war, continuing to refer to the Church’s doctrinal documents from the late 19th and early 20th centuries with their strongly anti-communist tenor and maximalist aspirations. By way of example, on the basis of the pastoral letters of Pope Pius XI (1857– 1939), one of the group’s writers would argue in seemingly contradictory terms that (i) the state is a natural form of social life whose power, in line with Christian teaching, comes from God, making it incumbent on Catholics to obey the government; and (ii) that the state should be based on a commonwealth of concerned citizens and that the government cannot oppose the will of its people.⁶² This reference to Pius XI’s letters, thus, served to bolster the argument, so typical for interwar public discourse, positing that the prevalence of Catholics in the Polish population legitimised efforts to found public life on Catholic principles. Chief amongst the ecclesiastical documents used by the Warsaw Catholics as guidelines for their political reflections were the encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo anno (1931). Both of these had come about as reactions by the Holy See to the challenge of socialism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Among other things, these documents inspired Kaczyński’s circle to continue its promotion of small and medium-sized private businesses, as well as private property, as the primary guarantees of human freedom and a necessary condition for further economic and political development.⁶³ Developing this idea further, the economist Kazimierz Studentowicz (1903 – 1992) – an associate

 [A. Żur], “Neopozytywizm na tle rzeczywistości”, Tygodnik Warszawski, 25 (1946), p. 5.  There were three influential groups of Catholic intellectuals which appeared after the war and decided to take part in public debates: Kaczyński’s group, the Kraków group organized around the journal Tygodnik Powszechny and Bolesław Piasecki’s circle. Piasecki’s group will be discussed in the following section. It is noteworthy that the Tygodnik Powszechny circle, headed by interwar Catholic activists Jerzy Turowicz and Stanisław Stomma, proclaimed their plan of “escap[ing] to culture” as soon as their journal was established, shirking any political activities from the outset. See M. Jagiełło, “Tygodnik Powszechny” i komunizm (1945 – 1953) (Warszawa, 1988).  S. Dąbrowski, “O Chrześcijańskie zasady życia państwowego”, Tygodnik Warszawski, 25 (1946), p.1.  Z. Kaczyński, “Kościoł, naród, państwo”, Tygodnik Warszawski, 49 (1946), p. 3.

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of Kaczyński’s – constructed an economic programme which proposed organizing the Polish economic system “from below” to avoid the concentration of power in the hands of the bureaucracy. At a time when strict governmental oversight of economic life was championed in state propaganda as a necessary condition for post-war recovery, Studentowicz would publish a detailed taxonomy of the self-governing bodies which, in his view, should have been allowed to take over economic management functions from governmental institutions.⁶⁴ Studentowicz’s programme largely reproduced the ideas that had been at the core of the interwar Labour Party.⁶⁵ Even though the programme was published in July 1947, that is, after the announcement of the obviously falsified 1947 general election results,⁶⁶ it made few concessions to the altered political reality, in a further sign of the Warsaw Catholics’ faith in the agreement between Stalin and politicians returning from exile.⁶⁷ Indeed, the most noticeable change in the Warsaw Catholics’ post-war programme pertained not to their basic ideas, but to some of the strategies used to promote them. Kaczyński, for instance, invoked the authority of the Soviet Union⁶⁸ in defending his programme’s conservative aspects. Thus, in order to condemn the simplification of divorce proceedings carried out by the post-war government,⁶⁹ he pointed out that “even the Soviet Union tightened divorce rules in 1933”.⁷⁰ The example of the Soviet system, of which Kaczyński was largely ignorant, served less as a “reasoned argument” than a polemical tool to promote the Catholics’ core ideas. Even when the authorities began to take more decisive steps to discipline the public display of ideas, the Warsaw Catholics remained firm in their discursive insistence on the fact that the early 20th-century Catholic social doctrine could be implemented in post-war Poland. The rising influence of the security apparatus after the 1947 elections and increased tightening of the political regime, how-

 K. Studentowicz, “Samorząd społeczno-gospodarczy”, Tygodnik Warszawski, 26 (1947), p.5.  See W. Bujak, Historia Stronnictwa Pracy 1937 – 1946 – 1950 (Warszawa, 1988).  See M. Korkuć, “Wybory 1947 – mit założycielski komunizmu”, Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej, 1– 2 (2007), pp. 106 – 115.  It was Stalin’s idea to allow the former prime minister of the government-in-exile, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, and several other émigré politicians to take part in the creation of the Provisional Government in post-war Poland.  For more on how the USSR was represented in the public discourse of the Catholic intelligentsia, see A.M. Lokhmatov, “Obraz SSSR v refleksii Pol’skoi katolicheskoi intelligentsii (1945 —1948)”, in: A. V. Golubev (ed), Rossiia i mir glazami drug druga, (Moskva, 2017), pp. 201– 214.  New regulations on divorce proceedings were introduced between 29 November 1945 and 29 May 1946. Z. Ziembiński, “Prawo rodzinne Polski Ludowej po dwudziestu latach”, Ruch Prawniczy, Ekonomiczny i Socjologiczny, 26/4 (1964), p. 83.  Z. Kaczyński, “Kościoł, naród, państwo”, Tygodnik Warszawski, 49 (1946), p. 3.

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ever, would soon rob them of any illusions about their activities’ acceptability under these new political conditions. In July 1948, Studentowicz was arrested while trying to leave Poland. Following his interrogation, the security services decided to arrest the entire group. Kaczyński would be sentenced to 10 years in prison,⁷¹ dying in jail in 1953 (possibly killed by the security services).⁷² Thus, the maximalist project of the Warsaw Catholics, centred on the struggle to implement a pre-war programme in post-war conditions, was forcibly interrupted by the violence of the empowered security state. Their basic ideas had not changed in the face of the new political order, even as this order became less and less hospitable. It was only violence that destroyed their programme, for otherwise they would have failed to adapt to the rules of the new regime.

III Rhetorical tricks and (un)disguised continuities: the case of Piasecki This final section deals with another Catholic group, albeit one with a different ideological genealogy, gathered around the no less charismatic figure of Bolesław Piasecki (1915 – 1979). Since Piasecki’s personality played a central role in this group’s ideological identity, it is his biography that holds the key to its post-war ideological trajectory. Bolesław Bogdan Piasecki was born in 1915 in Łódź. According to friends’ accounts, Piasecki was from his youth involved in organizing various school clubs and underground communities, guided in this enterprise by a belief in his own “special mission”.⁷³ During the early interwar period, Piasecki became an active member of the National Democratic institutions headed by the nationalist Roman Dmowski, quickly advancing to a leadership position in the ONR-Falanga group which represented the nationalist movement’s most radical, fascist wing. Despite bitter conflicts among nationalist leaders, Piasecki was able to maintain his leadership position.⁷⁴ In the early days of the war Piasecki prepared a project envisaging nationalists’ collaboration with

 Other members of the group received sentences of anywhere between six years and life imprisonment.  See T. Sikorski and M. Kulesza, Niezłomni w epoce fałszywych proroków. Środowisko “Tygodnika Warszawskiego” (1945 – 1948) (Warszawa, 2013).  For more on this belief, see A. Dudek and G. Pytel, Bolesław Piasecki. Próba biografii politycznej (London, 1990), p. 12.  For more on Piasecki’s struggle in the endek camp, see Dudek and Pytel, Bolesław Piasecki, pp. 100 – 102.

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the Nazi authorities against the Soviet Union,⁷⁵ but was nevertheless arrested by the Gestapo. According to one version of events, he would be released from prison in 1940 after the personal intercession of Benito Mussolini thanks to Piasecki’s contacts with Italian fascists.⁷⁶ Subsequently, Piasecki actively participated in the anti-Nazi resistance, even heading one of the partisan units of the Home Army.⁷⁷ With the coming of Soviet troops in 1944, he was arrested by the NKVD. During his detention, Piasecki managed to speak directly with the Soviet general Ivan A. Serov, who had been charged with the struggle against “reactionary elements” in the territories controlled by the Red Army. In the course of this conversation, Piasecki blamed the Polish Committee of National Liberation for adopting a faulty propaganda strategy and asserted that nobody had explained the real aims of the Red Army to Polish society. In Piasecki’s view, the Lublin Government should have stressed that the new Poland would be an independent state, that it would not be incorporated into the Soviet Union, and that rebellious figures would not be deported to Siberia, thereby destroying the political diversity of the Polish nation. Only after such assurances would the Polish intelligentsia call for cooperation with Poland’s eastern neighbour.⁷⁸ This was a consummate exercise in rhetorical virtuosity: Piasecki the pre-war ultranationalist now cast himself as an ardent patriot striving to act in the interest of both “his nation” and its friendship with the Soviet Union. There was a lot of showmanship to this, with Piasecki repeating Soviet propaganda slogans on “the Polish question” verbatim. Indeed, the leading security service official Julia Brystiger, responsible for the fight against “Catholic reactionaries” after the war, would later wittily remark that Piasecki “had sold to our Soviet comrades what he did not have”.⁷⁹ As Brystiger’s joke suggests, Piasecki was to prove successful in selling his project (and his personality) to General Serov.⁸⁰ Thanks to his charm and charis-

 He did not sympathise with the Third Reich, for he hated Germany and Germans. Nevertheless, according to several accounts, Piasecki’s intention was to establish a public institution with the Nazis’ permission, whilst simultaneously participating in the underground struggle against the Nazi administration. See Dudek and Pytel, Bolesław Piasecki, p. 108 – 109.  Dudek and Pytel, Bolesław Piasecki, pp. 111– 112.  Dudek and Pytel, Bolesław Piasecki, pp. 132– 138.  See N. Pietrow, Stalinowski kat Polski Iwan Sierow (Warszawa, 2013), p. 51.  This story was related in an interview by the prominent Polish writer Stefan Kisielewski. “Stefan Kisielewski o Bolesławie Piaseckim i jego rozmowach z Sierowem”, in R. Reiff (ed), Archiwum Stowarzyszenia PAX (Warszawa, 2006), vol. I, p. 76.  It was commonly believed that Serov referred to Piasecki as “a genius boy” in his personal conversations with his Soviet comrades. Various version of this story were in circulation. It was

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ma, Piasecki was not only released from prison but also permitted to establish a publishing house as well as a political organization for like-minded Catholics. Though Piasecki’s pre-war activity in the fascist ONR-Falanga was reason enough for him to be re-arrested, if not executed,⁸¹ he would assume a privileged position in post-war Poland’s socio-political landscape. Having been released from prison on the decision of a Soviet general, Piasecki likely remained in contact with the Soviet embassy⁸² which, by all appearances, continued to protect him from the Polish authorities. At the same time, he established direct ties with some security service chiefs – ties that enabled him to survive Stalinization – despite the fact that his group had been labelled “reactionary” in security service reports right from the beginning of the post-war period.⁸³ The journal Dziś i Jutro (“Today and Tomorrow”), founded under Piasecki’s patronage, became a centre of attraction for many young Catholics who strove to participate in post-war public life outside the communist movement. The communists’ accommodation of this Catholic organizational semi-autonomy was, to some extent, part of Piasecki’s “pact” with the authorities.⁸⁴ Nevertheless, unlike Kaczyński, Piasecki and his colleagues from the interwar ultranationalist milieu understood they would have to adapt their ideology to the new political order. It was no longer possible, in a state that proclaimed itself a “people’s democracy”, to keep referring to democracy as “the Jewish bastard of the 19th century (żydowski bękart XIX wieku)”⁸⁵ as ONR-Falanga had done before the war. After 1945, Piasecki did not deny his earlier intellectual biography – this would have been senseless given he was famous for his interwar activism – but instead began to publicly recognize his previous “errors”. Thus, Piasecki confessed: “We believed in the strength of a people united from above, in one

repeated, for instance, by the former Stalinist head of public security Jakub Berman in his interview with Teresa Torańska. See T. Torańska, Oni (London, 1989), p. 88.  There was a special department that dealt with “endecja elements” (The word Endecja is formed from the abbreviation for ND – National Democracy) within the Ministry of Public Security, see Z. Nawrocki, “Struktura aparatu bezpieczeństwa”, in K. Szwagrzyk (ed.), Aparat bezpieczeństwa w Polsce. Kadra kierownicza. 1944 – 1956. (Warszawa, 2005), vol. I, p. 27.  See M. S. Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red. Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in 20th-Century Poland – The Politics of Bolesław Piasecki (Athens, 2012), pp. 77– 180.  A. Friszke, Między wojną a więzieniem. 1945 – 1953. Młoda inteligencja katolicka (Warszawa, 2015), pp. 243 – 263; Dudek and Pytel, Bolesław Piasecki, pp. 151– 189; Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red, pp. 77– 110.  His ambition was to legalise Catholics and put them, through his loyalty, under control of the state  J. Korowiec, “Małopolska – bastion ruchów ludowych – staje się terenem ekspansji Ruchu Narodowo-Radykalnego”, Falanga, 39 (1938).

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universal organization. We did not recognize elections and denied their importance. We were overt supporters of a mono-party”.⁸⁶ It is obvious that his discourse here alluded to the propagandist commitments made by the Communists to maintain political pluralism – commitments which had allowed Piasecki to continue his political activity in the new system. “We are currently opposed to a mono-party and all related systems”, Piasecki argued, adding that: “the opportunity to choose between good and evil without any mechanical pressure is the condition for the full development of the individual citizen. We have recognized this opportunity not only for ourselves but also for others. Hence, democratization is a challenge for us.”⁸⁷ In the post-war world, democracy guaranteed the coexistence of “materialistic and Catholic attitudes” in the public sphere. Piasecki understood that he could not dictate the rules of the game, and his new scheme was a protective one. Democracy served as an argument that served to prevent the monopolization of the public space by Communists and Socialists. Piasecki blamed himself for having entertained ideas that he now understood could endanger his own post-war activity. Nevertheless, despite such discursive adaptations, Piasecki maintained his monolithic understanding of the nation. Indeed, Dziś i Jutro’s “Program Declaration” asserted that “Poland is a nationally monolithic state”. Piasecki’s axiological hierarchy had, thus, remained unchanged since the interwar period in its most essential points: the aim of the individual continued to be “service to the Polish nation”.⁸⁸ Some aspects of this nationalist axiology did, of course, need to be disguised. Immediately after the war, for instance, Piasecki was forced to formulate a new take on the Jewish question. At first glance, this could look like an abnegation of his pre-war Antisemitism.⁸⁹ The “Program Declaration” asserted that “any manifestation of racial hatred against Jews should be condemned”.⁹⁰ At the same time, Piasecki remarked: “Nevertheless, it should be noted that the new source of Antisemitism lies in the excessive participation of Jews in the ruling apparatus, owing to their qualifications, and in disproportion to their total number in the country (emphasis mine – A.L.)”.⁹¹ The perception of Jews as representatives of “Jewish” but not “Polish” interests was, thus, not re-

 B. Piasecki, “Po prostu”, Dziś i Jutro, 1 (1945), p. 2.  B. Piasecki, “Po prostu”, Dziś i Jutro, 1 (1945), p. 2.  To trace the parallels between Piasecki’s pre-war and post-war political principles, compare B. Piasecki, Kierunki, 1945 – 1960 (Warszawa, 1981), p. 7.; and Zasady programu Narodowo Radykalnego (Warszawa, 1937), p. 1.  Piasecki, “Po prostu”, Dziś i Jutro, 1 (1945), p. 2.  Piasecki, Kierunki, p. 8.  Piasecki, Kierunki, pp. 8 – 9.

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jected at the theoretical level. The associated understanding of the Polish nation as an entity with its own special interests was central to Piasecki’s self-presentation in the post-war period.⁹² By “translating” his pre-war ideas into a new language without fundamentally changing their meaning, Piasecki was able to maintain a large degree of ideological continuity despite political changes that appeared hostile to his old ideology. Piasecki developed his political image as a defender of patriotic and national values together with the expansion of his Catholic organization, PAX. By the early 1960s, PAX was one of the largest non-communist public organizations (1965 – 3152 active members; 1967– 7253; 1968 – 9230).⁹³ By this time, Piasecki saw himself as a great theorist.⁹⁴ His articles and speeches offer plentiful evidence of Piasecki’s desire to spearhead new directions in socialism and Catholicism alike. Nevertheless, familiar concepts like those of “national historical aims” and “national interests” remained present in his writings and were even integrated into Piasecki’s crowning ideological innovation, the sophisticated idea of a “socialist-patriotic formation” (formacja patriotyczno-socjalistyczna).⁹⁵ Feeling free from Marxist orthodoxy, Piasecki – by this time a deputy in the Polish Diet (1965 – 1979) – presented himself as the only public defender of “Catholic patriotic socialism”. His relationship with the security services and his international contacts⁹⁶ helped him not only to convince the authorities that his activity was necessary for the state, but also to create and develop a platform for the promotion of ideas that were obviously rooted in his interwar nationalist activity. Given that nationalist discourse played an important role in the legitimation of the socialist regime,⁹⁷ it is unsurprising that Piasecki managed to establish some rapport with conservative socialists and communists in the Polish establishment. Indeed, he would play an active role in the “anti-Zionist” campaign of 1968 which saw PAX ally with the antisemitic wing of the Polish United Workers’ Party and the security services, enabling Piasecki to openly dis-

 For more on how Piasecki’s discourse with regards to the Polish nation developed, see Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red, pp. 77– 180.  D. Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna (Warszawa, 2000), p. 22.  E. g. Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red, pp. 146 – 147.  E. g. B. Piasecki, “O rozwój formacji patriotyczno-socjalistycznej”, in B. Piasecki, Siły rozwoju (Warszawa, 1971), pp. 5 – 16.  E. g. P. H. Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades, pp. 135, 142– 143, 164– 165; Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red, pp. 77– 180.  M. Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm. Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja władzy komunistycznej w Polsce (Warszawa, 2005).

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cuss ideas which were hard to express in dogmatic Party language.⁹⁸ Thus, Piasecki the one-time interwar ultranationalist had by the late 1960s risen to a position of considerable power in the socialist state, all the whilst continuing to develop and promote his basic nationalist ideas. The ability to maintain continuity in his ideology while claiming a radical break with it helped Piasecki to continue his “intellectual history” without any major caesuras despite the many dramatic political changes that occurred in Poland between the 1930s and 1960s.

IV Conclusion The end of the Second World War was one of the major political watersheds of the 20th century, and an important event in the histories of all three intellectual groups discussed in this chapter. Nevertheless, closer examination of how the basic ideas which shaped their intellectual agenda developed can help us to problematize a “periodization” of these ideas based on political events. For the group gathered around the Kuźnica journal, the establishment of the post-war regime was a moment that significantly changed their political status and, with it, the ideas which they began to promote in the public sphere. A ragtag group of oppositionally minded “café intellectuals” before the war and protagonists of underground literary discussions on Marxism during it, by 1944 they had metamorphosed into the ideologists of the new government’s cultural agenda. This became a turning point in the “history of (their) ideas” as their intellectual stance shifted from one of criticism towards the advancement of a positive programme. Having placed his trust in the pact with Stalin, Zygmunt Kaczyński returned to Poland in 1945, determined to implement his pre-war political programme and continue his pre-war struggle against the Left despite its newfound power. His return to Poland did not significantly change the core of his programme or indeed his readiness to fight for the ideals of Social Catholicism that had been formulated decades earlier. Thus, for Kaczyński’s basic ideas, 1945 did not represent a significant caesura. The continuity of his pre- and post-war ideas would be snuffed out not through intellectual development but extrinsic repression. Meanwhile Bolesław Piasecki, who was well-known among Polish intellectuals as a fascist, retained this reputation after the war (at least among left-wing  Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna, pp. 47– 69; Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red, p. 146.; A. Lokhmatov, “Conceptualising ‘Anti-Zionism’: Piasecki’s Group as an Intellectual Resource for the 1968 Antisemitic Campaign in People’s Poland”, Europa Orientalis. Studi e ricerche sui paesi dell’Est europeo, 38 (2019), pp. 103 – 118.

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intellectuals) but was nevertheless able to find a space for the development of his nationalist programme in the post-war system. His arrest by the NKVD in late 1944 became a starting point in the process whereby Piasecki adapted his general ideas to fit the new political reality. The flexibility of his political discourse allowed him to retain his pre-war ideas and enrich them with many new elements, without eliciting a repressive response from the state as had happened to Kaczyński. If 1945 did not affect each group’s intellectual development to the same degree, then the Stalinization of the cultural realm begun in 1948 was a jolt that no intellectual movement could avoid. Nevertheless, each group experienced different forms of “Stalinization”, which invariably depended on the respective political and ideological strategies pursued by each group in the years leading up to it. Kaczyński’s hostility to Communists would be repaid in kind: the Tygodnik Warszawski group was disbanded by the security services as a political opponent which threated the “stability” of the state. Piasecki, by contrast, thanks to his contacts with the security services and chameleonic willingness to offer public support to the authorities’ chosen line, was able to keep PAX afloat in the Stalinist years and even to develop his basic ideas in the public domain. Right until his death in 1979, Piasecki maintained his position on the political scene and managed to survive all political crises. Meanwhile, Kuźnica would experience Stalinization as a form of discipline from above, a soft form of repression conducted by high party functionaries who feared that heterodoxy in publications of the Left would be tolerated less by the Soviets than in the Catholic press, which – in contrast to Communist publications – was not analysed by the Soviet embassy or discussed by the Soviet Politburo. A perspective which foregrounds the plurality of coexisting “histories”, even in the context of intense ideological competition between different intellectual groups, makes it significantly harder to create great historical narratives. Political events as a narrative structuring device in history-writing lose some of their lustre when confronted with the various “logics” of development, action, and “intellectual behaviour” displayed and enacted by historical actors. This perspective, however, is important for more than just the professional concerns of historians. The idea that the public sphere is a meeting point for people with various understandings of the current moment, and that this current moment plays different roles in various “periodizations”, is not as trivial as it appears to be at first glance. Bearing these ideas in mind when analysing the public debates of the past and the ideological contradictions of the present would frequently improve scholarly and public understanding of why the arguments or opinions of debate participants are formulated in this way or that. Additionally, such a perspective helps challenge the dominance of a statist logic when thinking about

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the past and to decentre political events in our understanding of public life, turning them from the primary dictator of basic categories into just one influence amongst many shaping intellectual activity.

Alessia Benedetti

Chapter 6 A “Product of a Certain Social Milieu” and a “Genius”: Analogies and Continuities between Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Debates on Dante in Russia There are few events in history for which the term “caesura” can be used without exaggeration. The Russian Revolution of 1917 is undoubtedly one of them. It is another question, however, whether 1917 represented a turning point in the Russian literary canon as much as it was a caesura in broader historical terms. How Russian and Soviet culture should respond to the world-changing events that had unfolded between 1905 and 1921 was a frequent object of debate in the aftermath of the Revolution. “It is impossible to build a life on old ideals and outdated forms,” musicologist Nadezhda Briusova proclaimed in a text entitled On Proletarian Music in 1918,¹ thereby giving expression to a sentiment shared by other areas of the Bolshevik cultural vanguard, such as the Association of Proletarian Writers VAPP, the Futurist movement, and the experimental art collective Proletkult. ² However, caesuras in cultural history, much as they might be desired and fetishized by cultural vanguards, do not always coincide with caesuras in other areas of history. As will be shown, the post-revolutionary Soviet literary canon offers a good example of the lag between different kinds of historical develop-

Note: All Russian words and phrases transliterated from Cyrillic script are rendered in accordance with the ALA-LC (American Library Association and Library of Congress) transliteration system with the following exceptions: “Анатолий Луначарский”, “Белинский”, “Быстрянский”, “Веселовский”, “Дмитрий”, “Зелинский” and “Троцкий” are rendered as “Anatoly Lunacharsky”, “Belinsky”, “Bystriansky”, “Veselovsky”, “Dmitry”, “Zelinsky” and “Trotsky”, rather than “Anatolii Lunacharskii”, “Belinskii”, “Bystrianskii”, “Veselovskii”, “Dmitrii”, “Zelinskii” and “Trotskii”.  N. I. Briusova in G. P. Piretto, Quando c’era l’URSS: 70 anni di storia culturale sovietica (Milano, 2018), p. 2.  Although united in advocating new forms of art, movements like VAPP, Proletkult and the Futurists in other respects tended to diverge. For more on this, see S. Garzonio and M. Zalambani, “Literary Criticism During the Revolution and the Civil War, 1917– 1921”, in E. Dobrenko and G. Tihanov (eds.), A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism – The Soviet Age and Beyond (Pittsburgh, 2011), pp. 1– 16. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636000-007

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ment. Rather than offering a detailed history of the Soviet literary canon in its entirety,³ this chapter focuses on a significant example: the reception of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy before and after the 1917 Revolution. Given its strong Christian outlook, it would not be unreasonable to expect the Divine Comedy to constitute a poor fit for the Soviet canon. However, as this chapter will show, the Bolshevik cultural world found itself divided in its judgement of this work, thus, perhaps unknowingly, reproducing old debates that the Divine Comedy had been at the centre of since it first started to circulate in Russia. The history of 19th- and early 20th-century Dantean reception that this chapter provides aims to show how cultural phenomena can sometimes display unexpected resilience in the face of historical change. In 1921 a public event was held in Petrograd to commemorate the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death. It opened with a speech by the philologist Faddei Zelinsky, in which Zelinsky reflected on Dante’s significance for Russian society and the knowledge of his life and work possessed by the average educated Russian.⁴ According to Zelinsky, most Russians’ knowledge about Dante at this point in time could be summarised in two points: that Dante had been exiled from Florence by his political enemies and that he was the author of Inferno. ⁵ Zelinsky, however, was convinced that, at this particular moment in the country’s history, Russians were finally ready to discover more about “Dante’s immortal poem”. After all, as Zelinsky went on to explain, there was an underlying connection between Dante’s experience of exile and Russian contemporary history: “[…] we have become more able to understand his [Dante’s] città dolente [city of woe], now that we have built a città dolente for ourselves”.⁶ In the Divine Comedy, the words “city of woe” are engraved on the gates of Hell.⁷ It is not hard to see why they would have resonated with Zelinsky: in the two decades prior to his speech, Russia had twice faced revolutionary ferment (in 1905 and 1917), embarked upon and withdrawn from international conflict (1914– 1918), and undergone a disastrous civil war. By the time Zelinsky delivered his speech, Petrograd was in the grip of a famine emergency. The scale of

 For more on this, see E. Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford, California, 1997).  I. N. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Tvorchestvo Dante i mirovaia kul’tura (Moskva, 1971), pp. 489 – 490.  F. F. Zelinsky, “Privet Dante”, Vestnik literatury, 10 (1921), p. 2.  Ibid., p. 3. Translation mine.  All references to the Divine Comedy used in this article were taken from the text and English translation provided by the “Princeton Dante Project”, The Trustees of Princeton University and Prof. Robert Hollander, https://dante.princeton.edu/ (28 Oct. 2018).

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the difficulties faced by the city is best exemplified by a story later told about the Dante anniversary conference by Zelinsky’s former student, the historian Nikolai Antsiferov. Upon meeting his teacher at the event, Antisferov was struck by Zelinsky’s thinness and unkempt appearance. Despite Zelinsky’s best efforts at disguise, Antisferov’s eye was drawn to the black ink that Zelinsky had applied to his previously white sock, in the hope of concealing a hole in his shoe.⁸ Questions about Dante’s potential timelessness, like that discussed by Zelinsky, and in general about the place of literary classics in post-revolutionary Russia were not just the concern of the most conservative sections of the Russian cultural milieu, but rather lay at the centre of heated debates inside the Communist Party itself. At the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks faced a difficult question: what should post-revolutionary Russian culture consist in and what was to be done with the culture that had come before? The sections of the intelligentsia which had supported the Revolution did not provide a unanimous answer: some, like the Futurist avant-gardes, called for a class-conscious intelligentsia to take on the responsibility of art production, while other currents like Proletkult and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) believed that in post-revolutionary Russia art should be produced by a new generation of proletarian artists.⁹ In the early post-revolutionary years, however, some of the most important personalities in the Communist Party, like Leon Trotsky, distanced themselves from the kind of exclusive orientation towards novelty that characterised both of these positions. This clash of views can be better illuminated by looking at a specific case, like the debates around Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Like many literary discussions of the time, the Bolshevik debate on the Divine Comedy was characterised by a great plurality of opinions. Some, like Vladimir Friche, believed that Dante was a conservative writer – the expression of a purely medieval mentality. Others, like Vadim Bystriansky, argued that Dante was a genius and that his work’s political content still offered value for contemporary Russia. Trotsky also offered a favourable judgement of Dante, defending the work on artistic grounds, regardless of its historical content. Crucially for current purposes, all these arguments had their antecedents in the earlier attitudes that had characterised the Russian reception of Dante in the 19th century. This study highlights three aspects of the 19th-century reception of Dante which share similarities with how the Bolsheviks viewed his work. The first section focuses on the concept of Dante as a Romantic genius and on the political  M. V. Novikov and T. B. Perfilova, “Professional’noe stanovlenie F. F. Zelinskogo i ego sud’ba”, Iaroslavskii pedagogicheskii vestnik, 3 (2011), pp. 7– 17.  Garzonio and Zalambani, “Literary Criticism during the Revolution and the Civil War, 1917– 1921”, pp. 8 – 9.

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implications of this idea, as developed by Alexander Pushkin (1799 – 1837), the Decembrist poets and Alexander Herzen. The first half of the 19th century also saw the emergence of two other approaches to Dante, which would, however, only acquire prominence in the century’s latter half: Stepan Shevyrev’s aesthetic valorisation of Dante as well as Aleksandr Veselovsky’s more positivistic approach to the Divine Comedy. The second section is centred on the impact of these two modes of reception. Finally, the last section discusses the similarities (as well as the differences) between the modes of reception outlined above and the readings of Dante offered by Vladimir Friche, Vadim Bystriansky and Leon Trotsky. By using Dante as a case study, this analysis contributes to research on how readings of the classics managed to survive one of the most challenging caesuras in Russian history and all the fundamental changes to the country’s political and social structures this entailed.

I Dante as Romantic genius: the politicised reception of Dante in early 19th-century Russia To fully understand the Russian reception of the Divine Comedy, it is necessary to consider the role that French and German readers played in mediating the poem to the Russian public. Some of the elements which would later characterise the reception of Dante in the Communist Party emerged in the course of the 19th century as a result of the decline of French influence on Russian culture, on the one hand, and the rising interest in German literature, on the other.¹⁰ One of the main features which 19th-century Russia inherited from the German cultural environment and its approach to the Divine Comedy was the image of genius, as developed by August W. and Friedrich Schlegel. This motif led many to interpret the Divine Comedy as a challenge to the idealised Classical representation of Italy that was shaped by the preceding century of Dante reception and still actively promoted by the Tsarist authorities. As this section will demonstrate, the conflict between the Divine Comedy and Classical Italian culture not only had aesthetic  In the preceding century the Russian reception of Dante had been influenced to a great extent by an idyllic image of Italy imported by the Russian cultural environment from French eighteenth-century culture, particularly from travel literature. Among the most important products of this genre were Charles Dupaty’s 1788 Letters on Italy and Madame de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie (1807). The Arcadian image of Italy conveyed through these works had a strong influence on the early reception of Dante in Russia. For more on this, see W. Potthoff, Dante in Rußland: Zur Italien rezeption der russischen Literatur von der Romantik zum Symbolismus (Heidelberg, 1991), pp. 52– 65.

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implications, but also – through the influence of Friedrich Schelling – soon acquired political connotations. The concluding sections of this chapter, in turn, will show how later Bolshevik debates on the Divine Comedy echoed some of the notions of Dantean genius that developed in Russia in this earlier period. The concept of genius was first associated with Dante in Russia through the influence of the literary brothers August W. and Friedrich Schlegel, both of whom were key figures in the development of early German Romanticism. The Schlegels’ works on Dante started circulating in Russia after the publication of an anonymous article in the journal Novosti literatury in 1822, in which parts of Madame de Staël’s famous 1811 essay on German literature De l’Allemagne were paraphrased.¹¹ Having previously served to popularise the works of the German Romantics in France,¹² De Staël’s book came to be used by parts of the Russian literary world to challenge the dominance of the French cultural paradigm.¹³ The 1822 paraphrasing of De Staël’s work, however, also became an important milestone in the reception of Dante, for amongst the works mentioned and recommended in it were the Schlegels’ work on the Divine Comedy and August W. Schlegel’s translations of Dante. Amongst the most important contributions made by the Schlegels to the Russian reception of the Divine Comedy was the idea that, through his poem, Dante had created his own mythological world, while reaching the highest degree of stylistic excellence.¹⁴ This demiurgic view of Dante rendered him the perfect example of the Romantic genius – a combination of creativity and artistic perfection. The appreciation of Dante’s aesthetic accomplishments was strongly connected to the conviction, taken mainly from Friedrich Schlegel, that together with Shakespeare and Cervantes Dante’s work signalled the beginning of modern poetry, thus making him the creator of a writing style which went beyond the limitations of Classical poetry. This placed Dante directly at the heart of the early 19th-century conflict between the ancients and the moderns.¹⁵ Dante’s new factional associations influenced literary debates in Russia as well as the West. This would become especially true after complete French and Italian editions of the Divine Comedy became available in Russia, thereby giving its readership access to the Inferno, the first section of the poem, for

 Ibid., p. 80.  A. Zorin, By Fables Alone: Literature and State Ideology in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Russia (Boston, 2014), p. 336.  Potthoff, Dante in Rußland, p. 82.  E. Behler, “Dante in Germany”, in R. Lansing (ed), The Dante Encyclopedia (London; New York, 2010), p. 267.  Ibid.

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the first time. As a result, important personalities in the Russian intellectual world, including Alexander Pushkin, began to celebrate Dante, viewing him – through the lens of contemporary artistic preferences – as a Romantic poet. Clear evidence of this attitude is provided in Pushkin’s article On the insignificance of Russian literature which, though written in 1825, was only published posthumously: Romantic poetry was blossoming out richly and majestically in all Europe. Germany had long had its Nibelungen, Italy – its triune poem; Portugal – the Lusiad; Spain – Lope de Vega, Calderón and Cervantes; England – Shakespeare […].¹⁶

At a later point in the article, Pushkin openly blamed Dante’s unpopularity in Italy on the hegemony of French literary taste in Europe.¹⁷ Therefore, changing attitudes towards Dante in Russia at this time were as much part of a broader reaction against French literary dominance as they were a consequence of the emergent interest in Germany’s self-proclaimed Romantics. Attitudes towards Dante conveyed in German literature at the time also clashed with the image of Italian culture endorsed by the Tsarist authorities through the teaching of Classical languages. For a variety of reasons,¹⁸ Tsarist education policies had promoted the study of classical languages since the reign of Tsar Alexander I, when a new School Statute introduced in 1804 began to regulate the teaching of Latin in Russian gymnasia.¹⁹ In 1811 a reform promoted by  A. S. Pushkin, “On the Insignificance of Russian Literature”, in T. Wolff (ed), Pushkin on Literature (London, 1971), p. 353.  Ibid. Russians knew very well that part of the French Enlightenment had been critical of the Divine Comedy, particularly of the Inferno. In his Philosophical Dictionary Voltaire, for instance, had famously described Dante’s poem as a “hotchpotch” (whilst recognising the value of some of its passages) and described an excerpt from Inferno as being written according to a “bizarre taste”. Along with similar opinions expressed by other key figures in the French intellectual environment, this was likely one of the main reasons why, during the 18th century, Russian interest in Dante in Russia appeared to be either insignificant or limited to passages of the work which appealed to the dominant French taste, like the idyllic description of the Garden of Eden in Purgatory XXVIII, the first passage to be translated into Russian. This early preference for Purgatory was, in fact, highly specific to the Russian reception of Dante: studies on the Divine Comedy’s reception in France, Britain and Germany have established that the first of its parts to be translated was usually Inferno, rather than Purgatory. On this, see Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique. Tome II, in Œuvres Complètes de Voltaire (52 vols, Paris, 1878), vol. XVIII. For evidence regarding the popularity of Voltaire’s and other French intellectuals’ judgements on Dante in Russia, see Potthoff, Dante in Rußland, pp. 59 – 60.  For more information regarding the enforcement of the study of classical languages in Tsarist Russia, see P. L. Alston, Education and the State in Tsarist Russia (Stanford CA, 1969).  Potthoff, Dante in Rußland, p. 56.

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Sergei Semenovich Uvarov, then superintendent of the Saint Petersburg educational district and future Deputy Minister of National Education, introduced four-year gymnasia with the compulsory teaching of Latin and Greek.²⁰ Among the schools that were founded in the wake of Uvarov’s reform was the Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo, whose first alumni included numerous writers of the future generation of Romantic poets, like Alexander Pushkin and Anton Delvig.²¹ The Classical culture endorsed by these schools soon collided with readings of Dante influenced by new German ideas. The generation of poets who had been educated in Tsarskoe Selo and similar schools, where Italy was conceptualised as the land of Classical literature, began to perceive a conflict between Italian literature as it had been described to them, and Dante, whom they called a Romantic poet. As a result, Dante was deemed the greatest Italian poet, but at the same time his poetry was not believed to conform to the standard in Italian literature.²² The tension between Classical Italy and Romantic Dante was highlighted very clearly at the beginning of the 1830s in a letter written by Pushkin to the editor of the journal Moskovskii vestnik. In his letter Pushkin criticised the position of the Russian literary press regarding the distinction between Classical and Romantic literatures: […] finally, our self-appointed experts unceremoniously put Dante and Lamartine on the same level, despotically divide literary Europe into Classical and Romantic, attributing to the first the languages of the Latin South and to the second the Germanic tribes of the North, so that Dante (il gran padre Alighieri), Ariosto, Lopez de Vega, Calderon and Cervantes have fallen into the Classical phalanx, to which apparently victory will undoubtedly belong, given the unexpected help it received from the editor of the Moscow Telegraph. ²³

In this passage Pushkin questioned the way in which Russian literary journals had mechanically assigned all writers from the South of Europe to the field of “Classical literature”, pointing to Dante as a writer who, although Italian, would be more appropriately described as Romantic. Therefore, Pushkin’s interpretation seemed to acknowledge Dante as the most significant representative of Italian literature, even as it denied his representativeness of it. In other writings,

 E. Cinnella, Lo zar e il latino: Gli studi classici in Russia tra Otto e Novecento (Firenze, 2018), Kindle edition, p. 7.  Potthoff, Dante in Rußland, p. 57.  Ibid., p. 102.  A. S. Pushkin, “Pis‘mo k izdateliu ‘Moskovskogo vestnika’’, in D. D. Blagoi (ed), Sobranie sochinenii v desiatikh tomakh (10 vols, Moskva, 1962), vol. VI, p. 282. Translation mine.

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Pushkin framed the conflict between Dante and Italian literature as an opposition between “old” Classical and “new” Romantic literature, using a binary he and his circle often applied to contemporary literature.²⁴ The motif of Dantean genius soon developed not just aesthetic but political dimensions, engendered by the influence of another important German intellectual of the time: Friedrich Schelling. Schelling’s vision of the relationship between allegory and history, which he articulated in his essay On Dante in Philosophical Relation (1803), following similar reflections by the Schlegel brothers, posited that the characters in the Divine Comedy were not just historical in nature but also mythological, which in turn made them universally valid and lifted them above any connection to a single time or place.²⁵ Although this did not necessarily coincide with the author’s intentions, Schelling’s attempts to “dehistoricise” the Divine Comedy would later lead to its modernisation and politicisation by Italian patriotic thinkers, as well as the Russian radical intelligentsia. A radical understanding of Dante would gain particular popularity among poets who had supported the failed 1825 Decembrist uprising. Many of the Decembrists had indeed graduated from the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum.²⁶ These writers felt a particular affinity with Dante based on their common experience of exile. Though he did not participate in the uprising himself, Pushkin – as a Tsarskoe Selo alumnus and Decembrist sympathiser – offers a case in point. During his exile to southern Russia (1820 – 1824), Pushkin’s interest in Dante and Italian literature would noticeably increase, as is indicated by his frequent use of Dantean quotes in this period.²⁷ The manuscript version of Ruslan and Liudmila, 1820, for instance, ended on a quote from Inferno V: “Е quella a me: Nessun magior [sic.] dolore / Che ricordarsi del tempo felice / nella miseria” (“And she to me: There is no greater sorrow / Than to recall a time of joy / In wretchedness”).²⁸ Pushkin specialist and Marxist-Leninist literary critic Dmitry Blagoi has pointed out how this quote reflected Pushkin’s own mental state at the time of writing, a time when he was in exile in a remote and unfamiliar place.²⁹ This association between Dante and political exile was probably borrowed by Pushkin and the

 For more details on Pushkin’s definition of “old” and “new” poetry, see also A. S. Pushkin, “O poezii klassicheskoi i romanticheskoi”, in D. D. Blagoi (ed), Sobranie sochinenii v desiatikh tomakh (10 vols, Moskva, 1962), vi, pp. 263 – 266.  E. Behler, “Dante in Germany”, p. 267. On this, see also Potthoff, Dante in Rußland, p. 76.  L. A. Trigos, The Decembrist Myth in Russian Culture (New York, 2009), p. 3.  A. A. Asoian, Dante v russkoi kul‘ture (Sankt-Peterburg, 2015), pp. 40 – 43.  D. D. Blagoi, “Dante v soznanii i tvorchestve Pushkina”, in Istoriko-filologicheskie issledovaniia: sbornik statei AN SSSR (Moskva, 1967), p. 239.  Ibid.

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Decembrists from Byron.³⁰ Towards the mid-19th century, the Russian intelligentsia’s interest in radical Italian intellectuals and the Italian unification struggle further nourished this association.³¹ According to the literary critic Aram Asoian, evidence of how the heroic depiction of Dante as an exiled genius developed in the following decades can be found in the evolution of Dantean references in Aleksandr Herzen’s writings between the first and second half of the 19th century. Herzen first approached the Divine Comedy during his exile in Viatka, in north-eastern Russia, where he had been banished in 1835 for attending an event at which anti-Tsarist poetry had been recited. While in exile, Herzen began an ongoing relationship with Dante which he maintained until the end of his life.³² In his letters from the period he frequently compared himself to Dante, his fiancée Natalia Zakharina to Beatrice and his friend Nikolai Ogarev to Virgil. His correspondence shows a particular interest in the more mystical elements of Dante’s poetry.³³ Herzen subsequently described this phase of his life in the following terms: This was the time of Romanticism in my life. Mystical, poetry-filled idealism, love as an allconsuming feeling, which had guided everything in my life. […] This was the time of Gemütlichkeit (lyrism).³⁴

With the passing of time and the increasing awareness of his role as an opponent of Tsarist autocracy, Herzen extended his use of Dantean references from his correspondence into his observations on Russian society. In these writings, aimed at a broader audience, Herzen represented Russia as a reconstruction of Dante’s hell:³⁵ This Russia starts from the emperor and goes from gendarme to gendarme, from bureaucrat to bureaucrat, to the last policeman in the remotest corner of the empire. Every step of this staircase, like in the Dantean bolgi³⁶ [sic.], acquires a new evil force, a new degree of debauchery and cruelty.³⁷

 Asoian, Dante v russkoi kul‘ture, p. 24.  Potthoff, Dante in Rußland, p. 93.  A. A. Asoian, ‘Pochtite vysochaishevo poeta…’: sud’ba Bozhestvennoi Komedii Dante v Rossii (Moskva, 1990), p. 87.  Ibid.  A. I. Herzen in ibid. Translation mine.  Potthoff, Dante in Rußland, p. 140.  Bolge is the Italian term for the circles around which Dante’s hell is structured. Each circle is followed by another in a downward spiral, in which each circle corresponds to a sin of greater magnitude. Herzen used the Italian word in his text.

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Consequently, whilst Herzen’s original interest in and uses of Dante arose from introspection (perceived similarities between himself and Dante), he would later start turning to Dante as a source of inspiration when framing external realities (hence, the comparison between Russian social structures and Inferno). From his early fascination with the mystical aspects of Dante’s relationship with Beatrice and Virgil to his later comparisons between Russia and Dante’s hell, Herzen’s writings provide an effective example of how parts of the Russian intelligentsia moved from a receptiveness to early 19th century German Romanticism to a more socially-oriented attitude towards literature, which had political implications for the status quo. To sum up, thanks to the influence of contemporary German literature, Dantean reception in early 19th-century Russia had been dominated by the Romantic concept of genius, which in addition to its artistic significance quickly developed political, anti-Tsarist overtones. This earlier history will prove crucial to a proper diachronic contextualisation of Bolshevik debates around the Divine Comedy. Before moving on to this topic, however, it is necessary to account for other trends in Dantean reception which emerged partly in reaction to the radical intelligentsia’s appropriation of the Divine Comedy.

II Depoliticising the Divine Comedy: Aesthetics and positivism in the reception of Dante from the first to the second half of the 19th century Although the 19th century saw an attempt by some in the intelligentsia, like Herzen, to politicise Dante, this tendency would be opposed by two alternative approaches. The first was a purely aesthetic reading of Dante. The second, in turn, was an historicist interpretation which questioned the possibility of modernising Dante’s work. These tendencies would develop further towards the end of the century and continue to echo in Bolshevik debates on Dante. To understand how these approaches developed, this section will also situate them in the context of the emergent elite preoccupation with readership amongst the lower classes, which was an important feature of late 19th-century Russian culture. As will be shown later in the chapter, this contextualisation will also be important for making sense of subsequent Bolshevik attitudes towards literature.

 A. I. Herzen, “Russkii narod i sotsializm”, in Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh (30 vols, Moskva, 1954), vii, p. 329. Translation mine.

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First, however, a few words about the origins of the aesthetic reading of Dante are necessary. A key figure here was that of Stepan Shevyrev (1806 – 1864), a conservative literary critic and poet who also authored several texts on Dante. Having read Schelling, Shevyrev shared Schelling’s understanding of the Divine Comedy as a mythological creation, and of Dante as the creator of an eternal myth.³⁸ However, Shevyrev also penned a famous poem in 1830 which described Dante’s poetry in the following, more ludic terms: Что в море купаться, то Данта читать: Стихи его тверды и полны, Как моря упругие волны! Как сладко их смелым умом разбивать! Как дивно над речью глубокой Всплываешь ты мыслью высокой: Что в море купаться, то Данта читать.³⁹ Reading Dante is like bathing in the sea: His verses are solid and dense, Like the sea’s springy waves! How sweet it is to break them with a bold mind! How wonderful it is To float in this deep river with lofty thoughts! Reading Dante, is like bathing in the sea.⁴⁰

It is perhaps unfair to suggest that Shevyrev promoted an ahistorical reading of Dante, given he was also the author of a dissertation on Dante and his times.⁴¹ Regardless of the author’s intentions, however, there can be no doubt that for many of Shevyrev’s contemporaries these verses came to represent a purely aesthetic approach to the Divine Comedy. This understanding of Shevyrev’s reading was reflected in a statement by the writer Nikolai Kh. Ketcher, quoted by Herzen in an 1843 letter to Nikolai Ogarev:

   

Asoian, Dante v russkoi kul’ture, pp. 33 – 34. S. P. Shevyrev in A. A. Asoian, Dante v russkoi kul’ture, p. 99. Translation mine. Asoian, Dante v russkoi kul’ture, p. 33.

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[…] and it would be great if you could come as quickly as possible, especially as you can bathe in the sea while reading Dante even in Moscow, just like you bathe in the sea and read Dante there.⁴²

As Aram Asoian observed, the light-hearted sensuousness with which Shevyrev described his experience as a reader of Dante stood in contrast with the solemnity of Dante’s verses and, it may be added, with the more politicised image of Dante fostered by Pushkin, the Decembrists and Herzen.⁴³ One particularly critical evaluation of Shevyrev’s supposedly aesthetic reading came from Vissarion Belinsky (1811– 1848), a well-known raznochinets and literary critic who in Soviet times would be elevated to the rank of an undisputed authority in literary criticism.⁴⁴ That Belinsky’s rejection of an aesthetic reading was in direct response to Shevyrev’s poem is illustrated by the way he quoted the offending verse – the very same that Ketcher had quoted – to criticise authors and works where: every word apparently corresponds to a thought, when in fact every word corresponds to a rhetorical flourish, or to a wild association of objects which can’t be associated. One of these gentlemen […] perhaps, squeaks: “Reading Dante is like bathing in the sea, his verses are springy and dense, like waves in the sea”.⁴⁵

This was not the only occasion when Belinsky used Dante as a point of reference in his polemics against Shevyrev. Belinsky’s ironic parody of Shevyrev’s love of associations and comparisons was a subject of frequent debates between the two critics. This was further underscored by the polemics which followed the publication of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842). In his review of the novel, Shevyrev praised “the wonderful similes, which are often found in Dead Souls”: Their perfect artistic beauty can only be attained by someone who has studied similes in Homer and in Italian epic poets, like Ariosto and especially Dante, one of the poets of the new world who attained the full simplicity of the Homeric simile and returned it to the round perfection in which it manifested itself in the Greek epic.⁴⁶

 A. I. Herzen, “Pis’ma 1839 – 1847 godov”, in Sobranie sochinenii v 30 tomakh (30 vols, Moskva, 1954), vol. XXII, p. 147. Translation mine.  Asoian, Dante v russkoi kul’ture, pp. 33 – 34.  The raznochintsy were a class of intellectuals from humble backgrounds who gained positions of prominence among the Russian intelligentsia. For more see E. Dobrenko, The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture (Stanford, 2001), pp. 11– 18.  V. G. Belinsky in Asoian, Dante v russkoi kul’ture, p. 99. Translation mine.  Shevyrev in ibid., p. 100. Translation mine.

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Belinsky, on the other hand, was extremely critical of Shevyrev’s and other critics’ attempts to compare Gogol’s novel to “Homer and the Italian epic poets”. Although he was not opposed to Dante and Homer per se, Belinsky argued that exalting the epic dimension of Dead Souls inevitably distracted from the work’s criticism of contemporary Russian society.⁴⁷ For this reason, Belinsky claimed, it was more appropriate to compare Gogol to contemporary Russian writers, rather than figures from the past.⁴⁸ Belinsky’s caustic disapproval of Shevyrev’s aesthetic approach would have a strong influence on the section of the Bolshevik establishment that regarded with suspicion any separation of artistic appreciation from politics. Belinsky’s legacy would manifest itself, for instance, in the reactions to Trotsky’s post1917 defence of an artistic approach to the Divine Comedy. Trotsky’s legitimation of an aesthetic approach to Dante, however, did not only resemble Shevyrev’s reading of the Divine Comedy but also the official Tsarist response to the publication of Dmitry Min’s full translation of Inferno in 1853. Following Min’s translations of Inferno V (1843) and I (1852), this complete version of Inferno would prove extremely successful: published in installments in 1853, it was to be reprinted in a bound volume in 1855, and together with Purgatory and Paradise between 1902 and 1904 once complete translations of these sections became available. This was to be considered the standard version of the work in Russian until the appearance of Mikhail Lozinsky’s translation (1939 – 1945).⁴⁹ However, the path to publication for Min’s version was not an easy one. Following the 1848 revolutionary uprisings in Western and Central Europe, Tsar Nicholas I expanded censorship of the press. It was in this new climate that censors in Moscow took notice of Min’s translation of Inferno I, when it came out in the February 1852 edition of The Muscovite, and decided to refer it to Russia’s highest censorship authority in Saint-Petersburg.⁵⁰ Although the Moscow censors had claimed the poem was “dominated by a mixture of

 Belinsky in ibid. Translation mine.  Ibid.  Dante in Rußland, p. 151. For a detailed analysis of Russian translations of the Divine Comedy (including Min’s), see K. S. Landa, “Bozhestvennaia Komediia” v zerkalakh russkikh perevodov: K istorii retseptsii dantovskogo tvorchestva v Rossii (Saint Petersburg, 2020).  The following excerpts from the correspondence between the Moscow and Saint-Petersburg censorship bodies (in brackets) are my own translations. The Russian originals are quoted in R. M. Gorokhova, “’Ad’ Dante v perevode Mina i tsarskaia tsenzura”, in P. N. Berkov, A. S. Bushmin, and V. M. Zhirmunskii (eds), Russko-evropeiskie literaturnye sviazi (Moskva; Leningrad, n.d.), pp. 48 – 55.

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pagan and Christian concepts, by the constant convergence of mythological fictions with the truths of the Christian religion and by the expression of equal faith and equal respect for both”,⁵¹ the Saint-Petersburg censor Nikolai V. Rodzianko eventually authorised the publication of Inferno (with the exclusion of a few passages).⁵² Rodzianko absolved the Italian writer as a “flawless Christian” who, while “mixing Christian and pagan concepts”, was perfectly capable of “distinguishing the truth of the former from the delusion of the latter”.⁵³ More importantly, Rodzianko went on to say that Dante’s poem should be considered as “nothing more than a work of art” and that its aesthetic value was so great that the blending of Christian and pagan elements did not constitute sufficient reason to interdict the publication of “a poem that has existed for almost six hundred years and constitutes one of the first gems of the history of literature”.⁵⁴ Nevertheless, at the end of his report the censor expressed satisfaction that Min’s Inferno was a verse translation, and therefore in a format that made it “more accessible and entertaining to educated readers” rather than lower-class ones, who might mistake it for a theological work.⁵⁵ The Tsarist authorities were keen to control the kind of literature which was made available to the lower classes, and Rodzianko clearly judged the Divine Comedy inappropriate in this respect. However, labelling the poem as “nothing more than a work of art” suggests that, in the censor’s view, the Divine Comedy deserved appreciation principally for its stylistic accomplishments. Rodzianko’s reaction thus seemed to dovetail with Shevyrev’s aesthetic approach, not least in its tendency to depoliticise Dante. As the censors’ reactions to Min’s translation shows, questions around the literary “diet” of the working classes did not start with the Bolsheviks, but were firmly established in the second half of the 19th century. Similar issues preoccupied both the Tsarist government and a large section of the intelligentsia, rising to particular prominence after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The emancipation unleashed an ever-increasing influx of illiterate and semi-literate peasants into the Russian cities.⁵⁶ Here, the lower classes gained access to vari-

 Ibid., p. 49.  The complete list of the passages that were excluded from the first published edition of the translation can be consulted in ibid., pp. 52– 54.  Ibid., p. 50.  Ibid.  Ibid.  J. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861 – 1917 (Evanston IL, 2003), pp. 3 – 34.

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ous kinds of popular literature, including news, fiction and popular science.⁵⁷ This phenomenon was met with apprehension by the Russian educated classes, who feared that a literary culture ruled by the market could be detrimental to the moral values of workers and peasants.⁵⁸ The intelligentsia were in favour of a shared national literary culture, but one in which they were the arbiters. In the words of historian Jeffrey Brooks: Many educated Russians were committed to a conception of cultural order according to which the lower classes would share in a culture common to all Russians. This culture would be created by educated Russians but would be accessible to all. The proper goals of literacy and education were to enable people of lower-class origins to share in this general culture. The desired character of the general culture differed among educated Russians of different political persuasions, but most were committed to a concept of cultural unity. The development of an autonomous popular commercial literature was inconsistent with these notions of harmony.⁵⁹

These ideas prompted various agents of the educated world (activists, philanthropists, political propagandists, but also Church and state officials) to produce literature aimed at the working classes in the city and in the country.⁶⁰ To some extent, Russian Marxists also shared this yearning for ultimate cultural harmony. Starting from their interpretation of contemporary society as based on class conflict, Marxists deemed it impossible to achieve cultural unity under present conditions but nevertheless subscribed to the same idealistic vision of a universal culture, to be achieved in the classless society of the future.⁶¹ The idea that it was the duty of the intelligentsia to create a shared Russian culture unrestricted by class origin is essential for understanding future Bolshevik attitudes in the debate around pre-revolutionary literature. Politicised interpretations of Dante in Russia were not only at odds with aesthetic readings of the Divine Comedy, but also with new tendencies in literary criticism towards positivism. These tendencies were well-exemplified in the work of philologist Alexander Veselovsky, one of the most important Russian Dante scholars of the 1840s and 1850s. Although his works were partly indebted to Herder’s comparative analysis of English and German medieval literature, they also reflected a shift from the enthusiasms of early Romanticism to a

    

A detailed picture of Russian pre-revolutionary popular literature is offered in ibid. Ibid., p. 296. Ibid., pp. 295 – 296. Ibid., p. 296. Ibid., p. 328.

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more positivistic approach to literature.⁶² Despite being partly influenced by the Romantic interpretation of the Divine Comedy that rotated around Dante’s representation as an exceptional individual, Veselovsky did not view Dante as a modern genius. Instead, he sought to situate Dante in the specific historical circumstances which had inspired his work.⁶³ According to Veselovsky, “Dante was a collector, like Homer, like all the great epic poets of ancient times, who were great because they contained in themselves their whole epoch and a lot from the past”.⁶⁴ Veselovsky was particularly critical of politicised attempts to find connections between the Divine Comedy and the modern world. Notably, he condemned the appropriation of Dante by Italian patriotic thinkers. Veselovsky explained his thoughts in an article on the celebrations of Dante’s six-hundredth birthday that were organised in Italy in 1865. Veselovsky attended these celebrations and strongly criticised them for foregrounding Dante’s putative role in the Italian struggle towards national unity – an ambition that Italy had finally achieved in 1861, a mere four years before the Dante celebrations. In his article, Veselovsky called the Divine Comedy “an ultra-Catholic expression of the Middle Ages” and, among the various literary works produced to celebrate the Dantean anniversary, he praised those which, in his view, did not “approach Dante as an ideal type, a political tribune, a representative of Italian unity, but approach him as a man of the 13th century, and study the 13th century through him”.⁶⁵ A similar scepticism over whether Dante could be co-opted for modern political goals would later lead part of the Bolshevik establishment to conclude – in a manner that went beyond Veselovsky’s views – that there could be no place for Dante in modern Russia. To sum up, at a time when both the ruling classes and the radical intelligentsia were discussing the possible impact of literature on the working classes, two new tendencies in the reception of Dante began to oppose the politicisation of the Divine Comedy: first, a purely aesthetic reading of the work and, second, its historicist interpretation, which excluded any possibility of using Dante for contemporary political purposes. As will be shown, the reception of Dante in 19th-century Russia, with its focus on Dante’s genius and subsequent conflicts among radical, aesthetic and positivistic approaches to literature, contained cer-

 Asoian, Dante v russkoi kul’ture, p. 263.  Potthoff, Dante in Rußland, pp. 153 – 157.  A. N. Veselovsky in Asoian, Dante v russkoi kul’ture, p. 269. Translation mine.  A. N. Veselovsky, “Dant i mytarstva italianskago edinstva: po povody Dantovskago iubileia”, S.-Peterburgskiia vedomosti (21 May (2 June) 1865), p. 2.

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tain key features which would go on to characterise post-revolutionary debates on the Divine Comedy.

III The Commedia after 1917: the Bolshevik debate on Dante After the Civil War ended in 1921, the Bolsheviks began to discuss how the “new” literature should differ from the “old” and what the working classes ought to read. Both of these questions had already emerged in the 19th century. It was not, however, just a continuity of questions that tied Bolshevik debates on culture to 19th-century precedents. The Bolsheviks’ variety of attitudes to Dante, ranging from his celebration as a Romantic genius to a preference for historicist interpretations of the Divine Comedy, points also to more substantive continuities and correspondences at the level of literary reception. This section will focus on opinions relating to Dante expressed by three leading cultural figures in the Communist Party: Vladimir Friche, Vadim Bystriansky, and Leon Trotsky. Dante’s popularity was on the rise during Russia’s revolutionary decades. Between 1900 and 1922 the average yearly number of publications devoted to Dante reached a peak that would remain unparalleled for forty years.⁶⁶ In 1918, a full Russian translation of Dante’s Vita Nuova (1283 – 1293) was printed in Samara by the printing house affiliated with the Fourth Division of the Red Army.⁶⁷ In 1921, Russia commemorated the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death with numerous initiatives, including the publication of a bibliography of Dantean philology⁶⁸ and a conference organised in the presence of representatives from the Narkompros, the People’s Commissariat for Education, the body that would later become the Soviet Ministry of Education.⁶⁹ On the anniversary of Dante’s death in 1921 and in the years which immediately followed, Soviet authorities sought to determine which social forces the poet had represented and whether his had been a conservative or a progressive voice. Between 1921 and 1924, Soviet literary periodicals published several kinds of article on Dante, including reviews of new Italian academic works.⁷⁰ Analysis

 J. M. Kopper, “Dante in Russian Symbolist Discourse”, Comparative Literature Studies, 31/1 (1994), pp. 42– 43.  Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Tvorchestvo Dante i mirovaia kul’tura, p. 487.  Potthoff, Dante in Rußland, p. 48.  Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Tvorchestvo Dante i mirovaia kul’tura, p. 489.  Ibid., p. 492.

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of these articles indicates that, at this time, one of the main preoccupations of Soviet literary critics was to establish the place that Dante could occupy in the new proletarian culture.⁷¹ These discussions about Dante were part of a broader debate regarding the place of pre-revolutionary literature in post-revolutionary Russia. On this question the post-revolutionary intelligentsia did not have a unified position. Some of the voices in this debate, such as the Futurists and Proletkult, seemed almost exclusively oriented towards the rejection of the past.⁷² Others – as the aforementioned commemorations of Dante would suggest – took a more positive view of classic literature. On the more specific question of how Dante was to be read, the Bolsheviks were divided in similar ways to his 19th century readers (though there were several differences that will be analysed in due course). Some shared Veselovsky’s idea that Dante was exclusively a product of the Middle Ages; others were influenced by the political image of Dante as a Romantic genius; whilst another group, though not rejecting historicist approaches to the Divine Comedy, defended the possibility of appreciating the work in primarily artistic terms, inviting accusations of ‘careless’ aestheticism à la Shevyrev. An example of a Bolshevik figure whose views on Dante partly aligned with Veselovsky’s positivistic approach was Vladimir Friche. Friche was the author of a collection of essays on Western literature that was reprinted several times in the Soviet Union; he had already worked on Dante, particularly on Inferno, before the Revolution. In the 1920s, he directed the literary section of the Narkompros and later became dean of the Faculty of Philology at Moscow State University.⁷³ According to Friche, Dante embodied the values of the aristocracy and of chivalric culture, making him “an imperialist in the medieval sense of the word”.⁷⁴ In order to substantiate his idea of Dante as a conservative voice, Friche drew attention to Dante’s depiction of Fra Dolcino in Inferno. In life, Fra Dolcino was the leader of a 13th-century reformist movement which criticised corruption among the clergy and argued that disobedience to the Pope was permissible when his teachings appeared to contradict the Scriptures. The movement was crushed by the Catholic Church and in Inferno XXVIII Dante had the Prophet Mo-

 Ibid., p. 494.  For more on the early post-revolutionary literary scene, see K. Clark and E. Dobrenko, Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917 – 1953 (New Haven/London, 2007); S. Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca NY, 1992).  Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Tvorchestvo Dante i mirovaia kul’tura, p. 494.  V. M. Friche, ‘Dante Alig’eri’, Tvorchestvo, 4– 6 (1921), p. 38.

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hammed predict that Dolcino’s soul would be condemned to dwell in Hell among the heretics. Commenting on this canto, Friche would write the following: In the poet’s aristocratic paradise, where emperors and knights, ladies and saints drown in bliss, there was no room for a communist! […] So be it! On the day of Dante’s jubilee it is our duty that he, who fought with words for the aristocratic past, be placed alongside his contemporary Dolcino, who fought with a sword for the future, for communism.⁷⁵

According to the eminent Soviet Dantist Il’ia Golenischchev-Kutuzov, this passage testified to how Friche had drawn on Veselovsky in describing Dante as a figure rooted in a medieval past, not suitable for modernisation.⁷⁶ However, it should not go unnoticed that Friche reinforced his opinion of Dante by explicitly describing Fra Dolcino as a “communist”. Therefore, while seemingly positivistic in his effort to situate Dante within his original ideological and historical context, Friche unexpectedly reproduced the Romantic tendency to appropriate historical figures to serve contemporary political goals. Moreover, by creating an opposition between “Dante-past” and “Fra Dolcino-future”, Friche intimated that Dante’s thought could be considered old-fashioned even for his own time, thus contradicting the idea, common amongst certain Marxists at the time, according to which Dante was a product of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.⁷⁷ This aspect of Friche’s interpretation was questioned by some sections of the Bolshevik world. The reservations Friche encountered were sometimes historicist in nature, as Anatoly Lunacharsky’s interpretation of Dante shows. ⁷⁸ At other times, counterpoints to Friche recalled political interpretations of Dante as a Ro-

 Ibid. Translation mine.  Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Tvorchestvo Dante i mirovaia kul’tura, p. 494.  See for instance Friedrich Engels’ preface to K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (New York, 2006), p. 37: “The first capitalist nation was Italy. The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the opening of the modern capitalist era are marked by a colossal figure: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of modern timesʺ.  One of Friche’s most important critics was Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Commissar for Education in the history of the Soviet Union, and author of numerous works of literary criticism. In his 1924 History of Western European Literature Lunacharsky expressed his disagreement with Friche’s characterisation of Dante, proclaiming the latter, together with Petrarch and Boccaccio, a poet of the early Renaissance, albeit one still rooted in the medieval past. He, therefore, criticised Friche’s classification of writers and literary periods for being too rigid and not considering epochs of transition. See A. V. Lunacharsky, “Istoriia zapadnoevropeiskoi literatury v ee vazheisheikh momentakh. Lektsiia 4”, in I. I. Anisimov and others (eds), Sobranie sochinenii v 8 tomakh (8 vols, Moskva, 1963 – 1967), vol. IV, (30 Sept. 2021) and Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Tvorchestvo mirovaia kul’tura, p. 496.

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mantic genius. We find an example of this approach in Vadim Bystriansky, another prominent Bolshevik intellectual who would later become head of the Faculty of Economics at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute. Bystriansky considered Dante one of humanity’s greatest poets. In his 1921 article paying homage to Dante’s memory, Bystriansky became one of the first Soviet publicists to use the non-Marxist category of genius in relation to Dante: If we consider his spiritual type, there was some degree of affinity between Marx and the greatest artist of the Middle Ages. Like Dante, Marx had a proud and independent personality and like the Italian poet he had to endure until the last day of his life the anger and hatred that class society prepares for the genius.⁷⁹

Whilst viewing Dante’s reception by his own society through the lens of class relations, Bystriansky nonetheless proposed to see Dante himself in a manner that foregrounded the personal over the social and that resonated with the Romantic image of Dante as a genius, particularly the Decembrist understanding of the genius as a figure who suffered injustice to defend his own freedom. Bystriansky’s representation of the intrinsic tension between class society and the artist appeared far more indebted to the Romantic exaltation of the individual than the Marxist celebration of collective subjects of the historical process. Moreover, by elevating both Dante and Marx to the status of genius, Bystriansky openly presented the two as exceptional individuals who transcended the material circumstances of their life, thus also challenging Marxist determinism. In this article, Bystriansky also took a stand in the Bolshevik discussion on whether the working classes should be encouraged to read Divine Comedy. On this question he expressed a decidedly favourable opinion. Bystriansky praised the Divine Comedy as the greatest work of literature of all time, a title it owed both to its political and ethical content and its capacity to continuously stir the reader to action.⁸⁰ In Bystriansky’s view, although Dante’s ideas were very far from the spiritual world of the proletariat, “the working class will be able to assess the poet’s greatness”.⁸¹ Bystriansky concluded his article by stating that among the treasures of poetic creativity produced across history, Dante’s poem “will shine like a priceless pearl and will become the property of the world’s proletariat”.⁸² Interestingly, while echoing late 19th-century debates on what the working classes should read, Bystriansky’s argument also used a met-

   

V. A. Bystriansky, ‘Pamiati Dante’, Kniga i revoliutsiia, 1/13 (1921), p. 14. Translation mine. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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aphor which recalled that employed by Rodzianko, the Tsarist censor (“a poem that has existed for almost six hundred years and constitutes one of the first gems of the history of literature”). Although he used similar language to the censor, Bystriansky used it to buttress the opposite conclusion: where Rodzianko had claimed that the Divine Comedy was dangerous to the lower classes and should only be made available to an educated readership, Bystriansky envisioned the work becoming part of a proletarian literary canon. The question of whether the Divine Comedy should be recommended to the working class was one of the most hotly debated issues during these early postrevolutionary discussions on Dante. As mentioned earlier, these debates must be seen as part of a larger conflict between advocates of a new culture made by the proletariat and defenders of the pre-revolutionary classics. One of the most important occasions where these positions confronted each other was a meeting organised by the press department of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party on 9 May 1924. At this gathering, the demand for a new proletarian literature was trumpeted by Fedor Raskol’nikov, while Leon Trotsky led the charge to spread knowledge of pre-revolutionary classics among the proletariat. It was here that Trotsky outlined an aesthetic approach to literature, which courted condemnation for its similarity to Shevyrev’s take on Dante. Raskol’nikov, a key figure in the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, made strident calls for a new art made by the proletariat under the party’s supervision.⁸³ Trotsky, by contrast, believed that the creation of a new culture should be postponed until the masses “have come of age culturally”.⁸⁴ He considered the call for a new culture premature, considering the “extraordinary cultural backwardness of the overwhelming majority of the proletariat”.⁸⁵ He believed the party’s priorities should lie in “the growth of literacy, education, special courses for workers, the cinema, the gradual reconstruction of everyday life, the further advance in the cultural level”.⁸⁶ Interestingly, both sides in this debate used Dante as an example to explain their own attitudes towards literature and to set them apart from those of their opponents. In Trotsky’s view, Raskol’nikov claimed that the value of the Divine Comedy lay solely in its capacity to reflect the mentality of a specific class in

 E. Dobrenko, “Literary Criticism and the Transformation of the Literary Field during the Cultural Revolution, 1928 – 1932”, in E. Dobrenko and G. Tihanov (eds), A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism – The Soviet Age and Beyond (Pittsburgh, 2011), p. 45.  L. Trotsky, ‘Class and Art. Culture Under the Dictatorship’, Marxists Internet Archive (2002), https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/05/art.htm (20 May 2019).  Ibid.  Ibid.

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a specific era.⁸⁷ In his reply Trotsky described this view as “a historical approach to Dante” and, without ruling out its legitimacy, underscored its distinction from an aesthetic approach, which demands that the work of art “must speak to” the reader’s “feelings and moods”.⁸⁸ In Trotsky’s words: Dante was, of course, the product of a certain social milieu. But Dante was a genius. He raised the experience of his epoch to a tremendous artistic height. And if we, while today approaching other works of medieval literature merely as objects of study, approach the Divine Comedy as a source of artistic perception, this happens not because Dante was a Florentine petty bourgeois of the 13th century but, to a considerable extent, in spite of that circumstance. […] I am sure that many, like me, would, after reading Dante, have to strain their memories to remember the date and place of his birth, and yet this would not have prevented us from getting artistic delight, if not from the whole of the Divine Comedy, then at least from some parts of it. Since I am not a historian of the Middle Ages, my attitude to Dante is predominantly artistic.⁸⁹

This debate bears striking similarities with pre-revolutionary discussions on Dante, despite some significant differences. On the one hand, Raskol’nikov fostered a historicist view of Dante which recalled the late 19th-century effort to situate Dante within the Middle Ages. On the other, he carried this approach to the extreme by suggesting that only medieval historians should read the Divine Comedy – a conclusion which was implied by neither Veselovsky nor Friche. Trotsky’s riposte to this was to invoke the 19th-century understanding of Dante as a genius who transcended his historical moment. However, alongside this appeal to the Romantic category of genius, Trotsky also chose to defend the legitimacy of a primarily aesthetic approach and to argue that it was precisely for these qualities that the Divine Comedy and other pre-revolutionary classics should be recommended to the proletariat. Here, Trotsky reversed the judgement expressed by the Tsarist censor Nikolai Rodzianko, despite starting from an analogous premise. The Tsarist censor claimed that since the Divine Comedy was “just a work of art”, the lower classes should not read it (lest they mistake it for something else), while Trotsky saw this as precisely the reason why they should. The transcript of Trotsky’s speech shows that, as he defended an aesthetic approach to the Divine Comedy (“Since I am not a historian of the Middle Ages, my attitude to Dante is predominantly artistic”), a certain Riazanov who was in the audience interrupted him with the following words: “That’s an exaggeration. ‘To read Dante is to take a bath in the sea’, said Shevyrev, who was also

 F. Raskol’nikov in ibid.  Trotsky, “Class and Art”.  Ibid.

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against history, replying to Belinsky”.⁹⁰ It is remarkable that 19th-century debates were sufficiently present in Bolshevik minds as to make an audience member detect in Trotsky’s approach an apologia for Shevyrev and his supposedly aesthetic, apolitical and, therefore, suspicious reading of Dante. It is equally remarkable that, in making this connection, Riazanov expected others to understand his accusation. In defence of his approach, Trotsky immediately parried: I don’t doubt that Shevyrev did express himself as Comrade Riazanov says, but I am not against history – that’s pointless. Of course the historical approach to Dante is legitimate and necessary and affects our aesthetic attitude to him, but one can’t substitute one for the other.⁹¹

To those who accused him of promoting a superficially aesthetic approach to Dante over a more serious historical one, Trotsky insisted on defending the legitimacy of both aesthetic and historical approaches, whilst admitting that “the historical approach to Dante […] affects our aesthetic attitude to him”. Though the hesitant beginning of Trotsky’s reply may suggest he was less au fait with Shevyrev than Riazanov, the latter’s outburst is nevertheless suggestive of the extent to which Bolsheviks knew that, in debating such issues, they were engaging with the cultural battles of the past.

IV Conclusions This study has shown how analysing the reception of a literary work can help us uncover unexpected elements of resilience in the Russian cultural environment across its most challenging historical turning points. This was done by revealing how Bolshevik readings of the Divine Comedy echoed 19th-century responses to it and reproduced the main lines of conflicts – one between politicisation and historicism, the other between aesthetic and historical attitudes towards art –that had divided 19th-century critical opinion. Placing later Bolshevik debates in a larger diachronic context, therefore, sheds new light on post-revolutionary attitudes towards pre-revolutionary literature. Other areas of this subject still warrant further investigation. More work needs to be done to assess how far the Bolsheviks themselves were aware of the correspondences between their own views and those of their 19th-century predecessors. Riazanov’s reference to the Shevyrev-Belinsky polemic in his de Ibid.  Ibid.

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bate with Trotsky suggests that 19th-century discussions around literature were well-known in at least part of the Bolshevik cultural establishment. This clue may lead to further research into the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the intellectual classes of the past. Another question which demands clarification concerns the motivations that led some in the Soviet establishment to defend the pre-revolutionary classics. As was shown, Trotsky believed that defending the classics was a necessary measure as long as the working class had not “come of age culturally”. However, other studies have pointed to alternative explanations for why many like Trotsky continued to promote the classics. According to Jeffrey Brooks, post-revolutionary discussions on literary classics had their origins in the late 19th century, an age which saw an attitude shift in certain parts of the Russian intellectual milieu. In this period sections of the Russian intelligentsia were turning away from the church and the state and declaring their allegiance to Russian culture, Russian classics in particular, and committing to spread knowledge of the classics among the working classes.⁹² The legacy of this intelligentsia turn to culture, Brooks argues, continued to be felt after the Revolution. Once they rose to power, the Bolsheviks had to find symbols other than the church and the Tsar to unify the country; the prior reorientation of the Russian intelligentsia towards the Russian classics made the latter an obvious alternative.⁹³ For this reason, Brooks concludes, “the canonisation of the classics” was “one of the most enduring trends of late 19th- and early 20th-century Russian cultural life”.⁹⁴ However, Brooks’ observations apply exclusively to Russian classics. The ways in which the Western classics were received in the Soviet Union are still largely unexplored. On the one hand, it is clear that the veneration of European writers continued after 1917: studies have shown that giants of literature like Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and Cervantes were widely read among the Soviet intellectual classes in the 1920s, and it is well-known that new translations of these works were published during the Stalin era.⁹⁵ However, less attention has been given to how this trend interacted with the continuing aspiration and effort to unify the country, which persisted into the 20th century and became even more prominent with the approach of the Second World War.

 J. Brooks, “Russian Nationalism and Russian Literature: The Canonization of the Classics”, in I. Banac, J. G. Ackerman, and R. Szporluk (eds.), Nation and Ideology. Essays in Honor of Wayne S. Vucinich (New York, 1981), p. 315.  Ibid., p. 316.  Ibid.  Y. Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, 2017), p. 510.

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To sum up, after the Revolution, part of the Bolshevik establishment was keen to preserve Dante among the Soviet population. The ideas and doubts which characterised their literary discussions echo concerns which had already dominated 19th-century debates. Further research will need to assess the degree to which this was a conscious continuity and to determine how other significant caesuras in Soviet history either did or did not affect the reception of the European classics.

Andrea Talabér

Chapter 7 Continuing Traditions: National Days in Czechoslovakia and Hungary during the 20th Century The 20th-century history of Central and Eastern Europe is often characterised as one of frequent and dramatic regime changes, divided into a series of sharply defined periods.¹ Dates such as 1918, 1939, 1948 and 1989 are familiar to the general public and represent pivotal moments around which national historiographies are structured in the countries of the region. Formerly part of a supranational empire, Hungary and Czechoslovakia became independent states after the First World War (1918), subsequently coming under varying degrees of Nazi German control and, in the case of Czechoslovakia, undergoing dismemberment (1939). After the Second World War they both fell under the Soviet sphere of influence and were taken over by their respective Communist parties (1948), which would remain in power until the transition to democracy in 1989. These dates mark dramatic events, such as revolution, state foundation or war, whereby one political system comprehensively replaced another. They are represented in historiography and national discourse as ushering in far-reaching changes in the politics, society, culture and indeed the entire life of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. In this view, not only does each new system represent a marked change, but it is also assumed to represent a complete displacement of and revolt against the preceding regime, seeking to eradicate the institutions and symbolism of its predecessor and replace them with its own. This mode of periodization – independence, war, communism, and democracy, with each demarcated by totemic dates and based on assumptions of total

Note: I would like to thank Despina Christodoulou, Lucian George, Dagmar Hájková and the two anonymous reviewers for their critiques and comments. The writing of this article and part of the research was carried out during my post-doctoral position at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences as part of the “Programme for the Support of Promising Human Resources (PPLZ)”.  See for example: G. Heiss et al., “Habsburg’s Difficult Legacy: Comparing and Relating Austrian, Czech, Magyar and Slovak National Historical Master Narratives”, in S. Berger et al. (eds), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 369 – 371. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636000-008

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change – undoubtedly provides a solid tool with which we can organise our knowledge and understanding of 20th-century Central and Eastern European history. This is especially so given the revolutionary nature of each of the enumerated regime changes and the all-encompassing character of the new ideologies that were ushered in each time. One area where the revolutionary character of 20th-century regime change is considered particularly visible is political symbolism: flags; anthems; stamps; statues and monuments; street names; and – the focus of this chapter – national days. Most typically, in the aftermath of revolutionary regime change, new leaderships would set about quickly erasing the symbols and cultural forms of the previous system, whilst also imposing their own. This further reinforces the meaningfulness of pivotal dates and the sense that the conventional periodization used for 20th-century Central and East European history, as described above, correctly marks out turning points. For all these dramatic discontinuities and proclaimed cultural revolutions, however, there were aspects of Central and East European history that, despite the best efforts of successive regimes, showed surprising stability throughout the 20th century. These tenacious continuities were especially manifest in the cultural realm and pose an obvious problem for the conventional forms of periodization outlined above. Nevertheless, they have largely been ignored in the scholarship of the region, which has tended instead to respect the aforementioned period boundaries by treating such cultural phenomena separately for each period. Against these assumptions, this chapter will show how cultural symbols and practices could give rise to traditions that were hard to displace and that political elites needed to respect if they wished to retain legitimacy, even when the traditions in question represented ideals that were opposed to their own. It will do so through a focus on national day celebrations in Hungary and Czechoslovakia throughout the 20th century. Here, it is worth invoking the work of Eric Hobsbawm, who argued that whilst many such traditions, or in the present case national days, are “invented”, they nevertheless “seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies a continuity with the past”.² It was precisely this supposed connection to the past and the consequently “educational” potential of national days that different regimes in 20th-century Hungary and Czechoslovakia sought to exploit, even if the focus on tradition meant muddying their own separateness from the regimes and historical phases that preceded them. Within the context of modern Central and Eastern European history (though these observations may also be transferable

 E. Hobsbawm, “Introduction: The Invention of Traditions”, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1993), p. 1.

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to other regions and periods) there is often, therefore, a great degree of deeperlevel continuity across periods, alongside surface rupture. Successive regimes may have wished to sweep away the practices and symbols of their predecessors, but instead often found themselves having to revisit, adjust and appropriate them. In his study of symbols in Communist Poland, the anthropologist Jan Kubik has sought to show how the Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe were from the outset doomed to fail in their projects of creating a wholly new socialist culture through the use of symbols that would sweep away “bourgeois” remnants. According to Kubik, the Communist parties in Central and Eastern Europe had three options available to them in the cultural realm: (i) to impose “a totally new culture [whilst socialising] the populace to accept it”; (ii) to accept or appear “to accept […] the existing (political) culture of the country”; or (iii) to limit themselves to “partially remodelling the existing culture”.³ As Kubik notes, several Communist regimes attempted the first option and failed. Meanwhile, the second option would have meant undermining the legitimacy of Communist rule. The only viable option, therefore, was the third: to adapt the existing culture, including national symbols, to the rhetoric of the new regime. As this chapter will show, the pressure to pursue this option would affect all 20th-century regimes and not just Communist ones. This would be particularly visible in the rewriting of national historical narratives by different regimes – something inextricably linked to national days, the focus of the present chapter. Despite often favouring an interpretation of history diametrically opposed in its ideological underpinnings to that which came before, each regime would nevertheless typically adopt the same national historical metanarrative, whilst reframing itself as the climax of national history. One reason why regimes find it difficult to erase earlier cultural forms resides in the endurance of tradition, however this may be defined. However, if traditions are predisposed to persist, they also have a tendency to be malleable, thus making them suitable objects for political manipulation. This quality of malleable resilience is precisely what makes traditions like national day celebrations so problematic when we examine them within the conventional periodization framework for 20th-century Central and Eastern Europe. On the one hand, throughout this period, national days were adapted and, in part, transformed so as to reflect the ideological narratives of successive regimes. On the other hand, each regime would eventually adopt aspects of national day commemora-

 J. Kubik, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park PA, 1994), p. 3.

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tions that had been established by the ideological adversaries who had preceded them in power. Thus, examining national days strictly within the period boundaries of any given political system limits our understanding of how they functioned within a “tradition” that was not simply invented but also continuously “re-invented”. As the sociologist Edward Shils argued, “tradition might undergo very great changes but its recipients might [still] regard it as significantly unchanged. What they are experiencing is rather a sense of filiation with a lineage of prior possessors of tradition.”⁴ National days – as one example of such practices – create a sense of lineage, both because they offer a collective commemoration of a historical figure or event and because they are eventually themselves reconstituted as traditions with an aura of permanence, owing to the fact that the same commemorative event ends up being repeated each year. For this reason, it is still important for a new regime to anchor the national days and commemorative practices that it “invents” in the historical past and to bestow a semblance of heritage upon them.⁵ Whilst both Kubik and Shils have emphasised pressures towards cultural continuity (or the appearance of continuity), it bears mentioning that such pressures can in some cases be successfully resisted on a lasting basis. Indeed, as will be shown, we find several examples of this in the national day calendars of Central and Eastern Europe. This is particularly the case in Czechoslovakia, where once widespread national days and commemorations – such as the feast day of John of Nepomuk, the 14th-century martyr – were, in fact, successfully erased in the 20th century. In this chapter, I examine national days connected to three medieval figures, who had long, commemorative traditions attached to them, respectively, in Hungary and the western half of what would later constitute Czechoslovakia. The figures in question are St. Stephen, the 11th-century founder of the Hungarian state; St. Wenceslas, the 10th-century Bohemian patron saint; and Jan Hus, the 15thcentury religious reformer, also from Bohemia.⁶ Each of these medieval figures was celebrated in the 20th century for their role in the creation of the historical nation-state or in establishing the spiritual-cum-intellectual underpinnings of the national mentality. Each of them was, moreover, commemorated even before the establishment of the interwar nation-states in 1918 and would continue to be

 E. Shils, Tradition (Chicago, 1981), p. 14.  It should be noted that tradition does not always claim to establish continuity with the period immediately preceding it – on the contrary, regimes can claim to restore traditions that their predecessors have neglected or abandoned.  The present chapter will not, however, deal with the figures of Saints Cyril and Methodius, who possessed regional significance in Moravia and Slovakia.

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commemorated in some form throughout most of the 20th century.⁷ For this reason, the national days associated with these figures lend themselves excellently to the study of how cultural forms persist, mutate and (in some cases) lose favour across nominally different periods. As I will show, the national days associated with medieval figures often possessed considerable staying power, thus disrupting the conventional framework of periodization. At the same time, I will also show how continuity was invariably entangled with innovation. The specific amount of innovation that regimes could get away with largely depended, in turn, on how rooted and extensive support for certain traditions was in a given society. In this regard, Hungary and Czechoslovakia will serve as contrasting examples. Because St Stephen was a wellrooted cult figure who commanded widespread support across the political spectrum, the Hungarian Communist regime was ultimately pushed to reincorporate him into the commemorative calendar despite initial attempts to purge him from it. In 20th-century Czechoslovakia, by contrast, allegiances to specific medieval figures were of a much more factional character compared to the St Stephen cult. As a result, post-1918 regimes would find it much easier to erase those figures who did not fit their ideological agendas from the state’s commemorative repertoire and to promote those that did. Continuity across periods was, consequently, a much less prominent feature of the Czechoslovak national day calendar compared to Hungary.

I Commemorating foundations and revolutions in Hungary Hungarian historiography conventionally dates the nation’s founding moment to the year 1000, when the medieval Hungarian state was established by King Stephen (c. 975 – 1038).⁸ Stephen converted the pagan Hungarians to Christianity,

 This Hungarian and Czechoslovak “obsession” with medieval figures is relatively unique. As the sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel observed in his study of national days in 191 countries, only nine countries have national days that commemorate medieval figures/events (dated as between 680 and 1492), including Hungary (St. Stephen), the Czech Republic (Saints Cyril and Methodius and Jan Hus) and Slovakia (Saints Cyril and Methodius). The other countries are India, Andorra, Switzerland, Spain, Bulgaria and Lithuania. E. Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago, 2003), p. 33.  St Stephen is considered to be the founder of the state, although the “conquest” of the homeland is associated with Prince Árpád in 896. See B. Varga, The Monumental Nation: Magyar Na-

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whilst also defeating and unifying a number of semi-independent tribes within the Carpathian basin.⁹ He was canonised on 20 August 1083, thereby becoming St Stephen, as he is more popularly known. Between the 11th and 18th centuries the cult of St Stephen became closely connected to that of the Virgin Mary, chiefly because legend proclaimed that on his deathbed King Stephen had offered his country to the Virgin.¹⁰ In the 18th century, the Habsburg emperors Maria Theresa and Joseph II elevated the cult of St Stephen to the status of an official religiopolitical cult, hoping this would ensure the loyalty of the Catholic Hungarian aristocracy to the Habsburg Empire.¹¹ The election of an already popular saint for this purpose was part of a broader Habsburg effort at the re-Catholicisation of those parts of the Kingdom of Hungary, especially Transylvania, where Protestantism had gained ground since the Reformation.¹² In granting the cult official form, Maria Theresa gave instructions for a procession of the Holy Right – the mummified right hand allegedly belonging to St Stephen – which was to be paraded in Buda Castle every 20 August.¹³ A century later, in 1861, the Hungarian politician Ferenc Deák coined the phrase “the Crown lands of St Stephen”, thus cementing the association between Stephen and the concept of an independent Hungarian nation-state that was taking shape in the second half of the 19th century.¹⁴ Following the 1867 Compromise between Hungary and Austria, Hungary was granted a unique degree of independence within the Dual Monarchy, with its own parliament and control over its domestic affairs.¹⁵ By the end of the 19th century, St Stephen’s Day was considered a fully national commemorative event, with many thousands of participants each year.

tionalism and Symbolic Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hungary, Kindle edition, Austrian and Habsburg Studies Book 20 (New York and Oxford, 2016), Loc. 151.  L. Kontler, “Foundation Myths and the Reflection of History in Modern Hungary”, in G. Sima et al. (eds), The Shifting Foundations of Modern Nation-States (Toronto, 2004), p. 131.  Á. von Klimó, “A nemzet Szent Jobbja: A nemzeti-vallási kultuszok funkcióiról”, Replika, 37 (1999), p. 47.  Ibid., pp. 48 – 49.  Ibid., p. 48.  Á. von Klimó, Nation, Konfession, Geschichte. Zur nationalen Geschichtskultur Ungarns im europäischen Kontext (1860 – 1948) (Munich, 2003), p. 94  F. Deák, “Zágrábmegye körlevele és az egyesülés”, Pesti Napló (24 March 1861), p. 3.  Concerning Hungary’s position within the Monarchy after 1867 see P. Haslinger, “How to Run a Multilingual Society: Statehood, Administration and Regional Dynamics in Austria-Hungary, 1867– 1914”, in J. Augusteijn et al (eds), Region and State in Nineteenth Century Europe: Nation-building, Regional Identities and Separatism (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 112– 115.

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The collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the reconfiguration of political borders it triggered – Hungary “lost” two-thirds of its historic territory as a result of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon – would be experienced as national traumas by much of Hungarian society, generating an altered political context in which it was possible for St Stephen’s Day to assume new emotional and political charges. The authoritarian regime of Admiral Miklós Horthy, which came to power after two brief revolutions and a counter-revolution, found a vehicle in the cult of St Stephen that both represented its irredentist goals and supposedly proved a continuity with the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. St Stephen’s Day already had an established religious (and national) commemorative choreography and associated national rhetoric. In this it was perfectly suited to the irredentist platform of the Horthy regime which, whilst keeping these formal aspects of the national day, at the same time transformed St Stephen into a truly national(ist) commemorative figure, projecting him as the symbol of the lost Greater Hungary.¹⁶ As the unifier of the Magyars and bearer of Christianity, St Stephen was an easy figure for the regime to appropriate and incorporate into its own Christian-nationalist-irredentist rhetoric. As Gábor Gyáni remarks, “the Horthy regime emphatically articulated its own political ideology through the language of historical mythology”.¹⁷ A key innovation of the Horthy regime was its focus on St Stephen’s role as the founder of an independent state – one that historically included the territories “lost” with the Treaty of Trianon. Thus, the Horthy regime manipulated the content of Stephen’s tradition as part of its effort against the Treaty of Trianon and its European backers. The Hungary of St Stephen was presented as having protected western Christianity against invasions from the East (most notably against the Turks) for centuries, only to have been betrayed by Western nations. In his speech during the 900th anniversary commemorations of St Stephen’s death in 1938, Horthy wove a narrative that emphasised the unfairness of the Treaty of Trianon, stressing that: “our predecessors fought to protect Christianity and thousands upon thousands of valiant Hungarians shed their blood in heroic battles whilst other countries could peacefully develop under our sacrificial protection”. Finally, he exclaimed with indignation: “Instead of gratitude and thanks we got Trianon!”¹⁸

 G. Gyáni,”Kommemoratív emlékezet és történelmi igazolás”, in L. Veszpémy (ed), Szent István és az államalapítás (Budapest, 2002), p. 571.  Ibid.  “Horthy Miklós kormányzó Szent István-napi beszéde”, in L. Veszpémy (ed), Szent István és az államalapítás (Budapest, 2002), pp. 541– 542.

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The hegemony of St Stephen’s cult and his popularity in interwar Hungary is visible from the manner in which criticism of 20 August was formulated. Rather than condemning the fact of his celebration, this criticism targeted the misuses to which he was put. One of the main critics of the national day was the Catholic Church, which felt that the Horthy regime had snatched the saintly figure of the founder from its rightful custodian, the Church, by secularising the event.¹⁹ Opposition to the Horthy regime’s instrumentalization of St Stephen was also strong among the Social Democrats. In a 1926 article, an anonymous priest writing in the Social Democrat newspaper Népszava admonished the generation of the 1920s for turning against Western values such as the rule of law, which Stephen had fought so hard to protect.²⁰ Thus, the “nationalisation” of St Stephen’s Day that had started in the second half of the 19th century culminated with the Horthy regime’s reframing of St Stephen as a primarily political figure. The religious element of the commemorations nevertheless remained important, particularly through the Holy Right procession and the celebration of St Stephen’s Hungary as a protector of the Christian West. The regime also used this religious element to promote its foreign relations with other authoritarian powers. This was particularly evident during the 900th anniversary of St Stephen’s death in 1938, which was the highpoint of St Stephen’s Day commemorations in the interwar period. The anniversary also coincided with the 34th International Eucharistic Congress held in Budapest. The honoured guests at the procession of the Holy Right were the representatives of Italy and Germany, soon to be Hungary’s Axis Power allies in the Second World War; they would be seated on the tribune alongside Archdukes Joseph and Albrecht, both members of the House of Habsburg and enthusiastic supporters of the revision of the Treaty of Trianon.²¹ Throughout most of the Second World War, the commemorative programme of the St Stephen’s Day celebrations remained the same as in the interwar period, with the Holy Right procession as the main event. There was, however, a new intensified focus on the territories “returned” to Hungary in 1938 – 1941 and their inhabitants, who were now freely able to participate in the celebrations.²² The “return” of these territories was Hungary’s “reward” for its close relations with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the “lost territories” having been regained

 Klimó, Nation, Konfession, Geschichte, p. 259.  ‘Szent István és a művelt Nyugat: Szent István-napi gondolatok”, Népszava (20 August 1926), pp. 1– 2.  E. Moravek (ed), A Szent István Emlékév (Budapest, 1940), p. 176.  “Húsz év óta először vettek részt az ünnepségen a Felvidék és Kárpátalja lakói”, Pesti Hírlap (22 Aug. 1939), p. 4.

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through the First and Second Vienna Awards (in 1938 and 1940). From the dismembered Czechoslovakia (now divided into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the Slovak Republic), Hungary gained southern Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus, while from Romania it received northern Transylvania. The Bácska/Bačka region was also “returned” from Yugoslavia in April 1941 after Hungary invaded the territory. This restoration of some of the “lost territories” was used to emphasise the achievements of the Horthy regime and became an important component during the Second World War of how the alliance with Hitler was justified.²³ In Budapest, groups from the returned territories marched in the Holy Right procession in 1939 along with groups from other regions of Hungary, thus signifying a unified national body.²⁴ After the war, there was a major reworking of the cult of St Stephen when the Hungarian Communists took full control of government in 1948. Although the Hungarian Communists (like other post-war Communist parties) promoted a “national line” that included many aspects of the standard national history, a medieval saint – especially one favoured by the previous right-wing regime – was not acceptable. Already in 1946, most likely because the Communist Party had the largest seat share in the Provisional National Assembly, St Stephen’s Day was not included in the new post-war national day law.²⁵ His national day was still commemorated by the Church with the Holy Right procession until 1946, but the procession was cancelled in 1947 once the Communists had manoeuvred themselves into a position of greater power.²⁶ Instead, the date of 20 August was kept as a national day, but transformed into the more peasant-oriented “festival of the New Bread”.²⁷ To further distance 20 August from St Stephen, in 1949 the new Soviet-influenced constitution of Hungary would come into effect on 20 August, thereby

 For the First and Second Vienna Awards see: J. Rothschild and N. M. Wingfield, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II, Third Edition (New York, 2000), p. 38; I. Romsics, Magyarország története a XX. században (Budapest, 2010), pp. 243 – 249.  “Gyönyörű ünnepséggel áldozott tegnap az ország Szent István emlékének”, Magyarország (22 Aug. 1939), p. 5.  L. Szűcs (ed), Dálnoki Miklós Béla Kormányának (Ideiglenes Nemzeti Kormány) Minisztertanácsi Jegyzőkönyvei 1944. December 23.–1945. November 15. A kötet, (Budapest, 1997), p. 332.  Á. von Klimó, “The King’s Right Hand: A Hungarian National-Religious Holiday and the Conflict Between the Communist Party and the Catholic Church (1945 – 48)”, in K. Friedrich (ed), Festive Culture in Germany and Europe from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, (Lewiston, 2000), pp. 358 – 360.  Klimó, “A nemzet Szent Jobbja”, pp. 52– 53.

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overwriting the foundation of the first Hungarian state with the foundation of the new socialist one. That this new constitution came into force on what had traditionally been St Stephen’s Day sent a clear signal: the 1,000-year-old tradition of Hungarian statehood was now part of the narrative legitimising the rule of the Hungarian Working People’s Party (MDP); at the same time the constitution heralded a new beginning that was oriented to the future and to building socialism without any reference to a legitimising medieval saint or religious element. The new national day law was passed a year later, in 1950. 20 August was officially no longer St Stephen’s Day but Constitution Day and according to the law: “The Constitution expresses and ascertains the result of those fundamental economic and societal changes that have been achieved by our nation since its liberation by the armed forces of the great Soviet Union, and the Constitution also designates the way forward for our future development on our way to socialism.”²⁸ Thus, the national past was deemed trivial; what the Hungarian people needed to focus on, with the aid of the Soviets, was building socialism in this new era. Nonetheless, the adoption of the constitution on 20 August and the continuation of a Communist-oriented national day on this day shows how much the Communists feared the potency of St Stephen and how they consequently sought to subsume him. An important turning point for the state’s commemorative calendar (even if its effects would not be immediately visible) came with the 1956 revolution. The revolution originally started as a peaceful protest, mainly by university students, in solidarity with the Polish October protests, but it would soon radicalise after the initial protest was aggressively put down by the State Security Police.²⁹ On 22 October, a group of students attempted to enter the main broadcasting station in Budapest to read their demands, which included the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops; a government led by Imre Nagy, a reformist Communist; the removal of the Stalin statue from Stalin Square (later known as Parade Square, today Fifty-Sixers Square in central Budapest); and the re-establishment of the anniversary of the 1848 – 49 revolution on 15 March as a national day.³⁰ The restoration of St Stephen’s Day, however, was not demanded by the revolutionar-

 “1950. évi I. számú törvényerejű rendelet augusztus 20. napjának a Népköztársaság ünnepévé nyilvánításáról”, in Magyar Közlöny: Törvények és törvényerejű rendeletek tára, 1 (25 Jan. 1950), p. 1.  J. Granville, “Poland and Hungary, 1956: A Comparative Essay Based on New Archival Findings”, in K. McDermott and M. Stibbe (eds), Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule (Oxford, 2006), pp. 58 – 60.  Gy. Gyarmati, Március hatalma, a hatalom márciusa: Fejezetek március 15. ünneplésének történetéből (Budapest, 1998), pp. 144– 147.

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ies, perhaps because 20 August had now become Constitution Day (as well as the Festival of the New Bread) and because the demands of the protestors were not (overtly) designed to overturn the socialist system and return to the ideals of the interwar period, but rather to reform it. The 1956 revolution showed that the Communists had not managed to convince the population that they were acting in their best interests. Because of this, after the armed intervention of the Soviet Union and the quashing of the revolution, the MDP was obliged to reinvent and rebrand itself. Under the new leadership of János Kádár the party renamed itself the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSzMP). From the late 1950s and the early 1960s, MSzMP (re)introduced “national” elements into their rhetoric and into the commemorative landscape, such as to demonstrate a clear break from the pre-1956 system and to placate the population. First, 21 March, commemorating the short-lived 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, was made into a national day in 1959.³¹ More pertinently, however, Stephen also made a return from the mid-1960s, although this time as king and not as saint. The regime kept a close eye on the 20 August commemorations. Reports by various organisations to the Agitation and Propaganda Department also monitored whether St/ King Stephen was mentioned during the celebrations. A 1960 report compiled by the National Council of the Patriotic People’s Front – part of the Central Committee of MSzMP – for example reported that “[t]he St Stephen characteristics of 20 August have been relegated to the background for most people”.³² At the same time there was a constant trickle of reports revealing how St/King Stephen had appeared in the commemorative narrative. For example, in the same report mentioned above the Patriotic People’s Front highlighted that at an undisclosed location in Veszprém county, in western Hungary, a delegate “emphatically commemorated Stephen I” during the commemorative general assembly.³³ In Eger in northern Hungary high mass was held on 20 August in the city Basilica; whilst the report did not explicitly mention whether St Stephen was evoked during the mass, this was nevertheless implied.³⁴ Further examples were also provided in subsequent years. For example, an Agitation and Propa-

 “1959. évi II. törvény a Magyar Tanácsköztársaság emlékének törvénybeiktatásáról”, in Törvények és rendeletek Hivatalos Gyűjteménye 1959 (Budapest, 1960), p. 12. For the history of this national day see P. Apor, Fabricating Authenticity: The Afterlife of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic in the Age of State Socialism (London, 2014).  Budapest, Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár (MNL), M-KS 288 – 22/ 1960 – 4. Report of the National Council of the Patriotic People’s Front on the celebrations of 20 August. Dated: 23 Aug. 1960.  Ibid.  Ibid.

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ganda Department report from 1962 on Egercsehi, a village in the northern Heves county, noted that women were heard proclaiming that it was King Stephen’s day as they left church.³⁵ As these examples suggest, most of these cases were linked to religious services and private conversations that happened to be overheard; there was certainly no notable public pressure to reinstate St Stephen’s Day. Even so, by the mid1960s the regime itself chose more explicitly to re-evaluate its attitude to King (although not yet St) Stephen, as part of the more reformist and accommodating turn adopted by János Kádár in what is referred to as “goulash Communism”.³⁶ The accommodation of King Stephen was most likely facilitated by a number of additional factors, such as the rapprochement between the Hungarian Catholic Church and the regime. Reflecting improved relations with the Vatican, this rapprochement resulted in a 1964 agreement between the Hungarian state and the Holy See whereby only those who were first approved by the state could be appointed to vacant bishoprics, thus providing the Communist regime with loyal agents within the Church.³⁷ By the mid-1960s, the Constitution Day celebrations had had time to generate and become associated with a number of novel practices, such as general assemblies, peasant-worker meetings, an evening firework display (a tradition that started in the interwar period), and a popular air and water parade, which usually included various acrobatic performances on the water, paratroopers jumping out of planes and flotillas of floats and boats sailing down the Danube whilst displaying banners with slogans about the regime’s achievements.³⁸ Putting aside the abolition of the Holy Right procession and the obvious absence of St Stephen, this national day programme was not all that dissimilar from the similarly entertainment-oriented focus of interwar celebrations. Although the annual St Stephen’s Day no longer existed, the millennial commemoration of King Stephen’s birth, on 4 May 1970, gave the regime the opportunity to officially re-introduce the figure to a wider audience. The Secretariat of

 MNL, M-KS 288 – 22/ 1962– 3. Summary report on the 20 August celebrations. Dated: 22 Aug.1962.  For the changing attitudes towards the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic see Apor, Fabricating Authenticity in Soviet Hungary.  K. Ungváry, “The Kádár Regime and the Subduing of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy”, in S. P. Ramet (ed), Religion and Politics in Post-Socialist Central and Southeastern Europe: Challenges since 1989 (London, 2014), pp. 88, 101– 102.  See, for example “Népünk ünnepi hangulatban ülte meg az alkotmány napját” Népszabadság (23 August 1965), p. 1; “A békés alkotómunka jegyében ünnepelt az ország” Népszabadság (22 August 1969), p. 1.

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the Patriotic People’s Front charged with organising the millennial commemoration for the “Stephen jubilee” proposed a joint commemoration of “the twentyfifth anniversary of the liberation of our homeland, the 1000th anniversary of King Stephen’s birth and the twentieth anniversary of the formation of the Priests’ Peace Movement”.³⁹ Whilst Stephen had, thus, once more come to symbolise the whole Hungarian nation and indeed its political community, the proposal for the celebrations put forward by the Patriotic People’s Front was emphatic that King Stephen should not overshadow the achievements of socialist Hungary, even in his religious dimension: “the progress of the Hungarian People’s Republic in the last twenty-five years must stand in the centre of the commemorations taking place in churches as well.”⁴⁰ In other words, whilst it was now acceptable to commemorate the founder of the Hungarian state, his achievements were to be subordinated to the goal of bolstering support for the “founding” of the Communist state. The religious side of King Stephen was, however, further “resurrected” in 1983 with the rock opera Stephen, the king, which recounted the rivalry between Stephen, embodying Christianity, and Koppány, the elder of the Árpád dynasty, who embodied paganism, having attempted to prevent the conversion of the Hungarians to Christianity.⁴¹ Religious themes were thus made central to the rock opera; as anthropologist Christopher Hann observed, “Christians in the audiences were not made to feel that their saint was being distorted to fit a socialist mould”.⁴² The “complete” rehabilitation of St Stephen finally occurred a year before the fall of Hungarian communism. On 20 August 1988 a Church mass was held outside Budapest’s St Stephen’s Basilica in the presence of the Holy Right – a symbol that had been banned since 1947 – thereby reinstating the religious element into the programme (even if the traditional procession remained

 MNL, M-KS 288 – 22/ 1970 – 3. Proposal regarding the 1000th anniversary of King Stephen’s birth. Dated: 3 May 1970. The Priests’ Peace Movement was established by the Communist regime on 1 August 1950 and was intended to divide the clergy by forcing the bishops to cooperate with the state. See J. Wildmann, “Hungary: From the Ruling Church to the ‘Church of the People’”, Religion in Communist Lands, 14 (1986), p. 162.  MNL, M-KS 288 – 22/ 1970 – 3. Proposal for the programme connected to the 1000th anniversary of the birth of King Stephen I. Secretariat of the National Council of the Patriotic People’s Front. Dated: 4 May 1970.  The rock opera is still popular today and has become a traditional part of the 20 August commemorations.  C. M. Hann, “Socialism and King Stephen’s Right Hand”, Religion in Communist Lands, 18/1 (1990), p. 14.

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absent).⁴³ To highlight the Communist regime’s reform-minded desire to open up, an invitation was even extended to the Pope to visit Hungary.⁴⁴ From the mid-1980s, Hungarian politics developed in a more open and democratic direction. The general public had been growing impatient with the regime and felt more able to voice its displeasure. The economy had been in decline since the mid- to late 1970s and opposition groups began to organise from the first half of the 1980s, chiefly among students and anti-communist intellectual circles.⁴⁵ The demonstrations held on 15 March, the anniversary of the 1848– 49 revolution, grew year by year. In 1988, opposition parties and organisations such as the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz) and the Hungarian Democratic Forum also began to organise.⁴⁶ Thus, by the summer of 1988 the Communist regime of Hungary stood on shaky ground, increasing its need for effective legitimation. Hence, it was not just the Catholic Church but also the MSzMP that tried to shore up its public support by allowing the Holy Right to be put on public display. To sum up, this section has sought to show that St Stephen was a malleable, yet resilient, political symbol. As Christopher Hann argued, such symbols “are the ones most likely to gain prominence at times when powerholders have no ready answers to pressing political and economic problems”.⁴⁷ Thus, re-introducing the religious elements of the Stephen cult in 1980s Hungary acted as a kind of “crisis management programme on the part of the state”.⁴⁸ From being banished at the beginning of the Communist era, the St Stephen cult ended up being almost completely restored by the end of the Communist period, as the Communists pursued a more accommodating strategy and were forced to deepen it in order to gain more legitimacy. Between 1918 and 1989, the celebration of St Stephen Day (or at least 20 August as a national day) continued notwithstanding several dramatic changes at the political level. Attempting to understanding this tradition solely through the  MNL, M-KS 288 – 22/1988 – 30. Opinions and media coverage of the 950th anniversary of St Stephen’s death and the invitation of Pope John Paul II to Hungary. Dated: 31 August 1988.  Ibid. For the relationship between the Church and the Communist state, see Ungváry, “The Kádár Regime and the Subduing of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy”, pp. 86 – 103.  I. Romsics, “A Kádár-rendszer legitimitásvesztése az 1980-as években”, Rubicon, 2009, http://www.rubicon.hu/magyar/oldalak/a_kadar_rendszer_legitimitasvesztese_az_1980_as_evekben/ (accessed 5 March 2020).  For the 15 March protests see Gyarmati, Március hatalma, pp. 188 – 195. For general political and social developments in this period see M. J. Rainer, A Kádár-korszak 1956 – 1989 (Budapest, 2012), Kindle edition, loc. 212– 217.  Hann, “Socialism and King Stephen’s Right Hand”, p. 5.  Ibid.

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rhetoric and practice of each successive regime would have a blinkering effect, restricting us from fully understanding how each regime continued or abandoned elements from the commemorations of its predecessor, as well as its reasons for doing so.

II Commemorations in 20th-century Czechoslovakia In the new post-1918 state of Czechoslovakia, establishing a national day calendar, and, by extension, an official, state-promoted version of national history that would be acceptable to all national and religious groups, was a more complicated process than in Hungary. A number of saints’ and martyrs’ days, as well as the anniversary of the state’s foundation, would all be put forward as proposals, whether by politicians, political parties, civic associations, the Catholic Church or even the new Czechoslovak Church, established in 1920 by radical Roman Catholic priests, bent on using a liturgy in the Czech vernacular as advocated by Jan Hus.⁴⁹ Medieval figures who were considered included: Saints Cyril and Methodius, the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries; the 10th-century Duke of Bohemia and later patron saint of the Bohemian lands, St Wenceslas; John of Nepomuk, the 14th-century priest and religious advisor to the German king of Bohemia Wenceslas IV; and the 15th-century religious reformer Jan Hus. Except for the anniversary of the state’s foundation all of these figures and the days associated with them had a long history of public commemoration. Whilst Hungary’s St Stephen would prove to be a malleable figure for different political regimes, Czechoslovakia’s potential medieval patrons all turned out to be less adaptable and the symbolisms and narratives attached to them more rigid. St Stephen’s “multivocality” had made him capable of representing a broad spectrum of society, thus increasing his chances of “survival”. In contrast, the aforementioned Czechoslovak figures were each tied up with the religious or ethnic history of rival communities within the country; the much-loved figure of one group was, consequently, often another’s symbol of oppression. This made the continuities in their representation more fragile and their partisanship more visible. For this reason, the interwar period saw vociferous debate among the

 See, for example: D. Hájková and E. Hajdinová, “Národní mučedník Jan Hus”, in D. Hájková et al. (eds), Sláva republice! Oficiální svátky a oslavy v meziválečném Československu, ed. (Prague, 2018), pp. 278 – 280; E. Hajdinová,, “Patron české země svatý Václav”, in D. Hájková et al. (eds), Sláva republice! Oficiální svátky a oslavy v meziválečném Československu (Prague, 2018), p. 360.

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various political, religious and ethnic groups in Czechoslovakia as to the purpose and function of these medieval figures, with none emerging as a clear unifying symbol for the nation. In contrast to Hungary, my examination of the Czechoslovak example will show how, whilst even less “rooted” national symbols enjoy continuity, when there is less space to “innovate” and when loyalties are splintered, regimes find it easier to supress national symbols and traditions.⁵⁰ The Habsburg rulers of the Bohemian Lands had clearly favoured some Bohemian saintly cults over others. Chief among these were the cult of St John of Nepomuk and, to a lesser extent, St Wenceslas. These cults were advanced for similar reasons to those that lay behind the Habsburgs’ promotion of Hungary’s St Stephen, that is, to entrench support for Habsburg rule through the strengthening of Catholicism.⁵¹ Wenceslas, Duke of Bohemia, had become a martyr when he was murdered by his pagan brother Boleslav on 28 September c. 929.⁵² In the 11th century, the cult of St Wenceslas had mainly focused on a biannual “liturgical celebration”, held first on 4 March to mark the date Wenceslas’ relics were transferred from Stará Boleslav to St Vitus in Prague, then on 28 September

 Nevertheless, we should not overlook elements of continuity in the case of Czechoslovakia. Although the official state narrative after 1918 emphasised ruptures, mainly through the process of so-called de-Austrianisation, i. e. the removal of Austrian/German elements from Czechoslovak public life and traditions, some commemorative practices from the Habsburg era proved resilient in the interwar period. Even before the official national day law was passed in 1925, St Wenceslas Day which had been celebrated in the Habsburg period continued to be commemorated on 28 September. The tradition of celebrating Emperor Franz Josef’s birthday, honoured on an annual basis under Austrian rule with various public festivals, parades and dedications, may no longer have been continued, but its precedent cast a clear shadow over the “new” tradition of celebrating the birthday of President Masaryk. For a good explanation of what de-Austrianisation entailed see: C. Morelon, “State Legitimacy and Continuity between the Habsburg Empire and Czechoslovakia: The 1918 Transition in Prague”, in P. Miller and C. Morelon (eds), Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918 (Oxford, 2019), pp. 53 – 56. See also: T.G. Masaryk, Cesta demokracie I: Projevy – články – rozhovory 1918 – 1920 (Prague, 1994), p. 172. For the parallels between the birthday celebrations of the Emperor and Masaryk see: D. Hájková and P. Horák, “Narozeniny prezidenta republiky”, in D. Hájková et al. (eds.), Sláva republice! Oficiální svátky a oslavy v meziválečném Československu, (Prague, 2018), pp. 137– 141. For the Emperor’s jubilee celebrations in the provinces see: D. L. Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848 – 1916 (West Lafayette, Ind, 2005), pp. 138 – 142.  The Bohemian lands roughly correspond to the territory of today’s Czech Republic and consisted of Bohemia, Moravia and the Austrian part of the Duchy of Silesia.  It is unclear when St Wenceslas was killed; two dates are usually mentioned, 929 and 935. However, as the year 929 is the one used in commemorative traditions, this is the one provided here. See also: Hajdinová, “Patron české země svatý Václav”, p. 354.

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(which also served as a post-harvest celebration).⁵³ By the later Middle Ages, Wenceslas had become the patron saint of the Bohemian lands and was portrayed as “the eternal ruler of the heavens”. Before battles, Bohemian soldiers would sing the St Wenceslas Chorale and march into battle under Wenceslas’ banner.⁵⁴ In the modern period, St Wenceslas started to acquire more nationalist overtones. During the 1848 Prague revolution, a petition that called for the unification of the Bohemian Crown Lands “into a single state within the empire” was submitted to the Emperor by a committee, later known as the St Wenceslas Committee. This strengthened the association between the saint and nationalist hopes of restoring historical rights to the Crown of St Wenceslas, in a manner reminiscent of how the phrase “Crown Lands of St Stephen” would be used in Hungary.⁵⁵ Crucially, however, opposition to the St Wenceslas cult also started to emerge around this time. The crafter of the “new” Bohemian historical narrative František Palacký wrote unfavourably about Wenceslas in his seminal 1836 – 7 work, The History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia (Dějiny národu českého v Čechách a v Moravě). In Palacký’s view, Wenceslas had compromised with the Germans by agreeing to pay them a tribute and accepting German priests. This made Wenceslas a problematic figure in a national revival process that opposed the total submission of the Bohemian lands to German Habsburg rule.⁵⁶ Palacký’s narrative gained ground in anti-clerical circles, which began to oppose the Wenceslas cult as anti-national and “purely Catholic”.⁵⁷ Though recognised as an important historical figure who proved the nation’s longevity and traditions of statehood, Wenceslas consequently lacked the same uncontroversial capacity to represent the nation possessed by St Stephen. Whilst St Wenceslas had been popular among Catholics since the Baroque period, the figure that Habsburg rulers were most keen to promote as part of

 L. Wolverton, Hastening Toward Prague: Power and Society in the Medieval Czech Lands (Philadelphia, 2001), p. 157.  J. Rak, , Bývali Čechové …: české historické mýty a stereotypy, (Jinočany, 1994), p. 37.  L. Holý, The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation: National Identity and the Post-Communist Transformation of Society (Cambridge, 1996), p. 37. See also: Hajdinová, “Patron české země svatý Václav”, p. 355.  R. Pynsent, Questions of Identity: Czech and Slovak Ideas of Nationality and Personality (Budapest, 1994), p. 198.  Hajdinová, “Patron české země svatý Václav”, p. 356.

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their re-Catholicisation campaign after the Battle of White Mountain⁵⁸ was John of Nepomuk; indeed, Nepomuk’s sainthood – granted in the 18th century – was partly of Habsburg design. Born in the town of Pomuk in southwest Bohemia, Nepomuk was a 14th-century priest and religious advisor to the German king of Bohemia Wenceslas IV, on whose orders Nepomuk would ultimately be killed. The manner of his killing – being thrown into the River Vltava – acquired a strong resonance in Prague; his statue is today one of the most distinctive on the Charles Bridge. From the late 17th century the Habsburgs, the Bohemian Catholic Church, and elite German-speaking families in Prague all undertook largely successful efforts to promulgate Nepomuk’s cult and ensure his canonisation.⁵⁹ By the time of the 19th-century national revival, however, this association with the Counter-Reformation and the Habsburgs would fatally undermine Nepomuk’s reputation amongst Czech patriots, sealing his fate in the next century.⁶⁰ Turning away from figures associated with the Habsburgs, Czech “national awakeners” looked instead to truly “national” historical figures and events, such as the 15th-century reformer Jan Hus or the Battle of White Mountain, in order to promote their national, supposedly anti-Catholic traditions. The first large-scale celebrations of Jan Hus, organised by the Bohemian political elite, took place in 1869 in Husinec, Hus’ birthplace, with further celebrations in Prague, on the 500th anniversary of his birth.⁶¹ The views of Czech liberal nationalists were greatly influenced by Palacký, who ascribed a pivotal role in Czech national history to Jan Hus and the Hussite movement.⁶² Likewise, the Battle of White Mountain became a totemic moment in the Czech national history under construction in the mid-19th century.⁶³  The battle took place on 8 November 1620, early in the Thirty Years War. The Protestant Bohemian estates were defeated by the Holy Roman Empire and its allies, leading ultimately to the re-Catholicisation of the Bohemian lands after a long period of Protestantism.  H. Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation, (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 280 – 300.  Hájková and Hajdinová, “Národní mučedník Jan Hus”, p. 274.  See: P. Morée, “Inventing Rituals to Commemorate Jan Hus Between 1865 and 1965”, Filosofický Časopis, 63/3 (2015), pp. 377– 382.  See, for example: F. Palacký, “History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia” (trans. D. Paton) in B. Trencsényi et al. (eds), Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770 – 1945): Texts and Commentaries, vol. II: National Romanticism, The Formation of National Movements (Budapest, 2007), p. 56.  C. Paces, Prague Panoramas: National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century, (Pittsburgh, 2009), pp. 22 and 89. The construction of national historical narratives was an important element of the so-called “national revivals” that took place in much of 19th-century Europe, often with a particular emphasis on the medieval past. See, for example: M. Baár, “Heretics into National Heroes: Jules Michelet’s Joan of Arc and František Palacký’s John Hus”, in S. Berg-

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Palacký’s stance greatly influenced the future president of the First Czechoslovak Republic, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Masaryk had been raised a Catholic, but converted to Protestantism and later became a fervent supporter of the Hus cult.⁶⁴ Hus was seen among Czech liberal nationalists and the Prague-based political elite, who dominated the rhetoric on Czech national identity, as the founding father of Czech national ideology.⁶⁵ With the establishment of the independent Czechoslovak state in 1918, these Czech liberal nationalists, led by President Masaryk, were able to dictate and shape the official historical narrative as well as the rhetoric and identity of the new state, which they centred around the ethical ideals of Jan Hus. The Prague-based political elite, to which Masaryk belonged, sought to promote what they believed were the democratic traditions of the Czechoslovak people (as symbolised by Hus) which were contrasted with the imperial rule of the Habsburg “oppressors” (as symbolised by Nepomuk). The Czechoslovak political elite saw the establishment of an independent state as a victory against the Habsburg oppressors in a reversal of the Protestant defeat at White Mountain.⁶⁶ This historical perspective had negative implications for the cult of Nepomuk, whose statues – once present in every Bohemian village – now became, like those of Joseph II, popular targets of attack among Czech nationalists.⁶⁷ Although the end of Habsburg rule and independence were viewed positively by what came to be the dominant political class in Czechoslovakia, the emphasis on an anti-German (anti-Catholic) and overwhelmingly Czech interpretation of national history made the creation of a national day calendar a tortuous process that in legal terms only concluded in 1925 when the official national day

er et al. (eds), Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 128 – 148.  See for example his book on Jan Hus: T. G. Masaryk, Jan Hus: Naše obrození a naše reformace, (Prague, 1925 [first published 1896]), p. 8.  Whilst Masaryk and the political elite of interwar Czechoslovakia may not have been liberals in the classical sense of the word, their ideas –especially those of Masaryk – bore “[l]iberal tenets”. Moreover, there was a conscious effortto represent the Czech state to the outside world as an embodiment of a liberal democratic political philosophy. At the same time, however, Masaryk rejected “formal liberalism”. See: A. Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914 – 1948 (New York, 2009), pp. 29 – 30.  See for example: “Zpráva vy´boru ústavně-právního k vládnímu návrhu (5061) zákona o nedělích, svátcích a památny´ch dnech republiky Československé (tisk 5119)” Session 336. (21 March 1925), http://www.psp.cz/eknih/1920ns/ps/stenprot/336schuz/s336001.htm (10 February 2019).  N.M. Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 148 – 150.

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law was passed. Between 1918 and 1925 significant grassroots support emerged for the inclusion of Jan Hus Day in the national day calendar, especially among liberal Czech who helped organise commemorations through well-oiled groups like the Sokol athletics club and the free thought movement, as well as various women’s associations.⁶⁸ A number of associations and organisations including the Czechoslovak Church also petitioned the Office of the President, the Ministry of Education and Enlightenment and the Ministry of the Interior to give Hus Day official legal status.⁶⁹ The St Wenceslas Day celebrations between 1918 and 1925 also gathered their own grassroots support, predominantly among Czech Catholics. However, these largely remained religious celebrations, lacking support from the government.⁷⁰ Both the Church and other proponents of St Wenceslas day – chief among them the Catholic Czechoslovak People’s Party – realised that they needed to introduce national elements into the celebrations to attract larger audiences.⁷¹ At the same time that the Church tried to give the day a more national flavour, non-religious actors such as Sokol, the Legionnaires, the army, schools and other institutions also began to take part in the celebrations in greater numbers, which led to the expansion of the programme to include educational lectures and torch-lit parades. To show loyalty to the new state, houses were decorated with national flags and the national anthem was played alongside the St Wenceslas Chorale.⁷² As the 1920s progressed, the need for an official, comprehensive national day law became more and more urgent. Among its advocates it was seen not just as a way of codifying the identity of the new state, but also a more practical remedy for the excessive number of chiefly Catholic holidays inherited from the Habsburg era.⁷³ The new national day law was eventually passed in 1925. In it the government recognised the importance of both Jan Hus and St Wenceslas to the Czech(oslovak) nation. The legislative bill was introduced in parliament by Josef Černý, a deputy from the Agrarian Party. In his speech before parliament Černý

 A. Talabér, “Commemorative Conundrums: The Creation of National Day Calendars in Interwar Czechoslovakia and Hungary”, Bohemia 56/2 (2016), pp. 409 – 410.  Hájková and Hajdinová, “Národní mučedník Jan Hus”, pp. 277– 281.  Hajdinová, “Patron české země svatý Václav”, p. 363.  Ibid., p. 361.  Ibid., p. 360. Showing loyalty to the new state during the St Wenceslas feast day was also important for the Catholic Church. See Ibid., p. 361.  Paces, Prague Panoramas, p. 116.

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wove together a historical narrative that included both Hus and Wenceslas.⁷⁴ In so doing, he effectively de-Catholicised St Wenceslas, emphasising his role as a “national patron” who guaranteed the historic right to statehood enjoyed by the Bohemian lands.⁷⁵ Jan Hus’ inclusion, meanwhile, was justified by Černý in the typical language of liberal Czech nationalism. Černý called Hus “the first awakener”, an “advocate of [the nation’s] right and freedom, a fearless fighter for the moral and spiritual liberation of mankind” and therefore hugely important not only for the Czechs, “but for the entire cultured world”.⁷⁶ In this sense, the bill also attempted a de-Protestantization of Hus, turning him into a kind of secular national and universal hero who could be celebrated for the universal values he was deemed to represent. Even so, commemorating Hus made little sense to a large segment of the population, particularly Slovaks and Czech Catholics. During the parliamentary debate, various members of the conservative-Catholic-nationalist Slovak People’s Party argued that for the Slovaks Hus meant nothing and attacked the bill as “anti-Christian”.⁷⁷ Václav Myslivec, a member of the Czechoslovak People’s Party, argued that the issue was not the introduction of Hus into the commemorative calendar, but the way in which Hus had been pitted against Catholic saints, especially John of Nepomuk.⁷⁸ Even so, not all the minorities in the new Czechoslovak state had issues with Hus and St Wenceslas. Franz Palme from the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party expressed his, and by extension “progressive” German, sympathies towards Hus, even as he emphatically denied support for Hus’ anti-German sentiments.⁷⁹ Despite the reservations of Slovaks, Germans, and Catholics in general, Jan Hus Day was included in the final bill, alongside St Wenceslas Day.⁸⁰ Although

 “Zpráva vy´boru ústavně-právního k vládnímu návrhu (5061), Session 336”. See also Talabér, “Commemorative Conundrums”, pp. 412– 413.  Talabér, “Commemorative Conundrums”, p. 413.  “Zpráva vy´boru ústavně-právního k vládnímu návrhu (5061), Session 336”; Talabér, “Commemorative Conundrums”, p. 413.  Nevertheless, the Slovak Populists’ leader Andrej Hlinka did acknowledge that for the Czechs Hus was an important figure. Talabér, “Commemorative Conundrums”, pp. 417–420; Hájková and Hajdinová, “Národní Mučedník Jan Hus”, p. 283.  “Zpráva vy´boru ústavně-právního k vládnímu návrhu (5061), Session 336”; Talabér, “Commemorative Conundrum”, p. 420.  Hájková and Hajdinová, “Národní mučedník Jan Hus”, pp. 283 – 284.  “65. Zákon ze dne 3. dubna 1925 o svátcích a památných dnech republiky Československé”, in Sbírka zákonů a nařízení státu Československého (Prague, 1925), pp. 433 – 434.

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John of Nepomuk’s feast day was omitted from the calendar, it remained popular, especially with Catholics in the countryside.⁸¹ It is clear from this brief survey of the national day commemorations associated with medieval figures that, whilst each figure had its followers, none could serve as a unifying glue for a multinational state that was also riven with religious cleavages. Although Hus was acceptable to most as a national figure, his anti-Catholic reputation meant he could not become a figure for all. St Wenceslas was again acceptable to most; however, he did not fit comfortably into the new ideological pillars of liberal democracy or an atmosphere negatively disposed toward Germans, Austria and the Catholic Church. The 1938 Munich Agreement not only spelt the end for the independent Czechoslovak state, but also deprived the official historical narrative promoted by that state of official support. The Second Czechoslovak Republic was only in existence for a short time: between the annexation of the Sudetenland by Nazi Germany in October 1938 and the complete occupation of the territory of the Bohemian lands on 14 March 1939. During this brief period the state turned to St Wenceslas and Catholicism for ideological support. The Czech leaders who served in the new post-Munich government, such as President Emil Hácha and Prime Minister Rudolf Beran, were primarily conservative and often Catholic figures, for whom it was not difficult to break with the Hussite narrative or to advance an alternative narrative that promoted St Wenceslas as a bridge between the Second Czechoslovak Republic and Germany.⁸² The narrative advanced by government of the Second Republic stressed St Wenceslas’ relationship with Germany (that Palacký had so criticised) and recast the saint as a facilitator of good Czech-German relations, thereby reflecting the contemporary desires of Nazi Germany. This reached its full articulation in the years after the 1939 dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, into the Nazi-controlled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the Slovak Republic. Protectorate officials initially favoured St Wenceslas Day over other national days, which were nevertheless, at first, allowed to continue.⁸³ In this they were motivated by the fact that St Wenceslas’ national connotations were less overt and that

 Hájková and Hajdinová, “Národní Mučedník Jan Hus”, p. 277.  J. Rataj, O autoritativní národní stát: Ideologické proměny české politiky v druhé Republice, 1938 – 1939 (Prague, 1997), p. 167.  The decision to keep national days alive, albeit under the close supervision of the Protectorate’s Secretary of State, Karl Hermann Frank, was driven by the new authorities’ desire to foster a sense of normality. The only holiday to be abolished was the Foundation of State Day on 28 October. Prague, Národní archiv (NARC), Předsednictvo ministerské rady, Box 501, Letter from K.H. Frank to the Prime Minister, Prague, (12 Sept. 1939).

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his holiday could be used to emphasise the historical connections – real or imagined – between Germans and Czechs. The official Protectorate narrative used St Wenceslas to put a new spin on the history of the Bohemian lands over the preceding 1,000 years: Wenceslas now came to represent the bond between Germans and Czechs, having brought the Bohemian lands into the Western cultural sphere by adopting Christianity and making peace with their powerful German neighbours. This Wenceslas-oriented reinterpretation of medieval Bohemian history also enabled Protectorate officials to re-evaluate the First Czechoslovak Republic. In 1942, during his St Wenceslas Day radio message entitled “Loyalty to St Wenceslas is Loyalty to the Reich”, the Minister of National Enlightenment Emanuel Moravec told his Czech listeners how over the past two decades the country had been “crippled, unfit and vegetating”. Moravec blamed this state of affairs on the anti-German policies of the Republic and warned that even after the Munich Agreement some Czechs were secretly collaborating with the English and the Jews against the “Great German Empire”. Moravec was particularly keen to debunk those 19th-century Czech liberal nationalist interpretations of history that had made Wenceslas appear anti-German. In the previous century the St Wenceslas Chorale – a church hymn beseeching St Wenceslas to protect the Czech nation and ensure its salvation – “had been understood to imply that Prince Wenceslas was our guard against the Reich”. But this, according to Moravec, was a misunderstanding, since Wenceslas had helped the Czechs make peace with the Germans and incorporated the Bohemian Lands into the Empire, “which gave them protection and uplifted them, so that they could flourish”.⁸⁴ In this interpretation, the First Republic no longer represented a final victory in the Czech struggle against the Germans or the Habsburgs, but a disruptive and dangerous break from German influence over the Bohemian lands. With the notable exception of St Wenceslas day, national days originating in the pre-1938 period would eventually be curtailed under the Protectorate. Despite official hostility, however, their celebration continued and even became a focal point of protest – at least in the Protectorate’s early years. On Hus Day in 1939 a number of anti-Nazi demonstrations would take place, with around 30,000 to 40,000 people gathering on Prague’s Old Town Square.⁸⁵ Despite the authorities’ efforts, St Wenceslas also became even more associated with Czech independ-

 “Věrnost sv. Václavu je věrností Říši.” Národní politika (30 Sept. 1942), p. 2.  D. Brandes, Die Tschechen unter Deutschem Protektorat, Teil I. Besatzungspolitik, Kollaboration und Wiederstand im Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren bis Heydrichs Tod (1939 – 1942) (München, 1969), p. 82.

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ence than he had been under the First Republic. Wenceslas Day was, thus, exploited for the purpose of protesting against the Protectorate regime and Nazi occupation. On the first Protectorate-approved 28 September commemoration, St Wenceslas Square became a focal point of this resistance. According to the Police Chief’s report, a crowd of 46, growing to somewhere between 150 and 200 by the evening, gathered in the square.⁸⁶ At 18.15, a group of five women began singing the St Wenceslas Chorale on the steps of the St Wenceslas monument. This was quickly stopped by the police, leading the women to disperse. People nevertheless continued to gather in front of the St Wenceslas monument where they proceeded to sing the national anthem “Kde domov můj” [Where is my home]. The police intervened again, but the crowd once more began to intone the St Wenceslas Chorale. By this point the demonstration counted as many as 2000 people, before finally being dispersed by security forces.⁸⁷ There were also reports of protests beyond Prague, in cities like Brno and Olomouc.⁸⁸ Following the 1942 assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, Czech resistance faltered. In 1942 Nazi officials passed a law akin to an equivalent law in the Third Reich, which required that all national days falling on workdays be commemorated on the following Sunday.⁸⁹ Anyone who violated these orders was either fined 20,000 crowns or punished with up to two months in prison. This ended grassroots protests against Nazi rule on Czech national days, but their potency and potential for use in such collective action had nevertheless been made apparent. After the Second World War, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) attempted to redefine the national historical narrative, especially through the national day calendar. Wenceslas was dropped – appropriation by the Nazis presumably offering a good excuse to sideline him – and the figure of Jan Hus was again brought to the forefront. Hus was the perfect vehicle for the KSČ: he was an anti-German and revolutionary symbol who, as we have seen, enjoyed popularity with the more left-wing and nationalist elements of Czech society and was already deeply embedded in the national historical narrative.

 NARC, Úřad říšského protektora v Čechách a na Moravě, Praha, č. f. 1005, Box 279, I-1a.  Ibid.  NARC, Úřad říšského protektora v Čechách a na Moravě, Praha, č. f. 1005, Box 279, I-1a The Reichsprotektor in Bohemia and Moravia, Moravia Group, Brno 5 October 1939 – Situational report for the month of September 1939.  “336. Regierungsverordnung vom 26. September 1942 über die Handhabung des Feiertagsrechts während des Krieges” Sammlung der Gesetze und Verordnungen Jahrgang 1942/ Sbírka zákonů a nařízení ročník 1942, (Prague 1942), p. 1685. For the law in the Third Reich see: W. J. Wilson, Festivals and the Third Reich, (PhD thesis, McMaster University, 1994), p. 298.

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Hus also fit well with the push for a “national line” and a national “revolutionary tradition” narrative that had been promoted by the Comintern since as early as the mid-1930s.⁹⁰ In the years 1945 – 47, before the 1948 coup which gave them full control of the government, the Communist leadership had argued for a “national road to socialism”.⁹¹ The Czechoslovak Communists aimed to reformulate “the Czech national self-understanding into a Slavic and socialist mould”, thereby enabling the Party to present itself as the next logical stage in Czechoslovak national history.⁹² The KSČ was “reinventing” and “refashioning” itself “as a patriotic, at times even nationalist party”.⁹³ Yet, it was not only the immediate past that needed to be reconfigured, but also the more distant one: most importantly Jan Hus – the “first modern revolutionary” – and the Hussites.⁹⁴ In 1946, Zdeněk Nejedlý, the chief party ideologue, published Communists: The Heirs of the Great Traditions of the Czech Nation (Komunisté: Dědici velikých tradic českého národa), wherein he drew links between the Hussite movement and the Czechoslovak Communists. Nejedlý argued that since the Middle Ages the Bohemian nobility could no longer be viewed as the custodians of national tradition: nobles had for the most part been foreigners – primarily Germans – and even if they had possessed Czech names in the past, they had since adopted German ones.⁹⁵ Nejedlý was convinced that, if Hus had been alive in the late 1940s, he would have been an active Party supporter: “Today Hus would be the head of a political party and his grandstand would not be the pulpit, but Prague’s Lucerna or Wenceslas Square. And very close to his side – we are convinced of this – would be us, the Communists”.⁹⁶ The increased emphasis on Hus’ social radicalism in the immediate post1945 period did not in any way contradict or override a simultaneous emphasis on his national credentials. In many respects, the narrative into which he was inserted was similar to that promoted under the First Republic. Thanks especially to the efforts of Zdeněk Nejedlý, “the new Communist interpretation of national

 For the policy of the “national line” see: M. Mevius, “Reappraising Communism and Nationalism”, Nationalities Papers, 37 (2009), pp. 385 – 388.  R.K. Evanson, “The Czechoslovak Road to Socialism in 1948,” East European Quarterly, 19 (1985), p. 469.  Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation, p. 6.  Ibid., p. 94.  Ibid., p. 100.  Z. Nejedlý, Komunisté: Dědici velikých tradic českého národa (Prague, 1946), p. 7.  Ibid., p. 22.

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culture […] became much closer to Palacký’s or Masaryk’s ideas”.⁹⁷All this would change, however, after 1948, when Popular Front tactics were abandoned in favour of Stalinisation. As a result, the national line was toned down and subsumed to the Soviet model of socialist development. In the new national day law passed in 1951 the KSČ introduced a hierarchical structure to national days, ranking them in the following order of significance: state holidays, (these being public holidays); significant days; and memorable days.⁹⁸ Despite the initial enthusiasm which had surrounded it in the 1940s, Jan Hus Day was classified as a memorable day, which placed it in the least significant category and deprived it of its pre-war status as a public holiday. References to Jan Hus Day in the media gradually dwindled and by the 1960s had almost disappeared.⁹⁹ The last relatively open celebrations of Hus took place in 1965, on the 550th anniversary of his martyrdom. However, these celebrations did not take place in Prague – though two exhibitions were organised for the occasion – but in Husinec and, in any case, they were largely academic and religious in nature. The previous narrative of Hus as a revolutionary Communist hero was absent.¹⁰⁰ Eventually, Jan Hus day was omitted altogether from the revised national day law of 1975.¹⁰¹

 M. Górny, “Past in the Future. National Tradition and Czechoslovak Marxist Historiography” European Review of History: Revue europeenne d“histoire, 10 (2003), pp. 108 – 109. This is perhaps not so surprising, given that Masaryk had taught Nejedlý. See: M. Kopeček, “Czech Communist Intellectuals and the ‘National Road to Socialism’: Zdeněk Nejedlý and Karel Kosík, 1945 – 1968”, in V. Tismaneanu and B. C. Iacob (eds), Ideological Storms: Intellectuals, Dictators, and the Totalitarian Temptation (Budapest, 2019), pp. 366 – 367.  “93. Zákon ze dne 2. listopadu 1951 o státním svátku, o dnech pracovního klidu a o památných a významných dnech”, Sbírka zákonů republiky Československé (Prague, 1951), p. 250.  For example, in 1958 First Secretary Antonín Novotný’s meeting with Khrushchev was the main news on 6 July; no mention was made in the main Communist daily Rudé právo of Jan Hus. Instead, on page 5 of the newspaper readers were reminded that it was the “day of international cooperation”. The following day, in the “short news” section on the second page, a short paragraph informed readers that Hus celebrations had taken place in Husinec and Tábor. In 1960, meanwhile, the KSČ’s national conference occupied the headlines, whilst in 1961 it was the Vietnamese delegation to Prague that dominated coverage. This silencing of Hus’ memory would remain the rule throughout the 1960s, when even the “short news” section generally stopped reporting on Hus Day. See: “Na historických místech Říjnové revoluce” Rudé právo (6 July 1958), p. 1; “Husitské oslavy v jizních Čechách” Rudé právo (7 July 1958), p. 2. and “Srdečné uvítání Pham-van-Donga”, Rudé právo (6 July 1961), p. 1.  Morée, “Inventing Rituals to Commemorate Jan Hus Between 1865 and 1965”, p. 385.  “56. zákon ze dne 11. června 1975, kterým se mění zákon č. 93/1956. Sb. o státním svátku, o dnech pracovního klidu a o památných a významných dnech”, Sbírka zákonů Československá socialistická republika (Prague, 1975), pp. 195 – 196.

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Despite how Nejedlý had initially championed Hus as a figure rooted in the radical national tradition, Hus ultimately fell out of favour with the KSČ because he was not seen as radical enough. In the early 1950s, there was a re-evaluation of Masaryk, a figure that had previously been seen in a somewhat positive light by the Communists.¹⁰² He was now, however, rejected as a bourgeois – a change of fortunes that also had a knock-on effect on the regime’s attitude towards Hus, whose cult was closely associated with Masaryk. Further contributing to this was the fact that, by the 1950s, younger Czech “Marxist intellectuals and activists, who worked in the party apparatus, labour unions, educational institutions, or the editorial staff of the daily Rudé právo and the cultural weekly of the Party, Tvorba” were beginning to make their mark. These cadres “had much more radical ideas about rebuilding Czech and Czechoslovak culture through revolutionary change inspired by the Soviet model”.¹⁰³ They found this not in Jan Hus, but in the more radical Hussite tradition of the Taborites. Nejedlý’s reading of the Hussite period and the 19th-century national awakening, meanwhile, came under criticism.¹⁰⁴ The influential historian and National Assembly deputy Josef Macek, for instance, argued that it was less the period when Jan Hus had been alive and more the subsequent Hussite wars (1419 – 1434) that actually mattered.¹⁰⁵ Thus, unsurprisingly, when in 1975 the national day law was revised, Hus Day was no longer included.¹⁰⁶ Jan Hus was demoted because he no longer served any purpose for the Czech Communists and because of his close association with the interwar era. The existence of a more radical Taborite past that offered itself as an alternative tradition smoothed this process. It bears mentioning in the context of this chapter’s broader argument, however, that the initiative to demote Hus and promote the Taborites was taken by the KSČ in response to its own ideological needs, and not due to public pressure to return to earlier traditions that still resonated – rather, it denoted a break from them.

 Kopeček, “Czech Communist Intellectuals and the ‘National Road to Socialism’”, pp. 371– 372.  Ibid., p. 367. Already in 1949 Rudé právo reporting on the Hus celebrations shifted its rhetoric towards praising the Soviet Union for enabling the Czech(oslovak)s to follow their true national traditions, rather than addressing the actual significance of Hus. For example, “Oslavy svátku M. J. Husi na Staroměstském náměstí” Rudé právo (1 July 1949), p. 3.  Kopeček, “Czech Communist Intellectuals and the ‘National Road to Socialism’”, p. 368.  J. Randák, V záři rudého kalicha: politika dějin a husitská tradice v Československu 1948 – 1956 (Prague, 2015), p. 55.  “56. zákon ze dne 11. června 1975, kterým se mění zákon č. 93/1956. Sb. o státním svátku, o dnech pracovního klidu a o památných a významných dnech” Sbírka zákonů Československá socialistická republika, (Prague, 1975), pp. 195 – 196.

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III Conclusion The collapse of Communism in 1989 yet again signalled dramatic changes and a turn away from the Soviet Union in favour of Western Europe, alongside an effort to transition to democracy. The new, democratically elected governments in both Czechoslovakia and Hungary claimed to be sweeping away the memory and traces of Communism when they reinstated, in their original form, the national days established in the interwar period – a period which was now reimagined as a time of national independence and political legitimacy. These “original” days were supplemented by a number of new national day commemorations intended to symbolise the struggle for democracy under Communist oppression.¹⁰⁷ Nonetheless, despite the almost universal condemnation of the Communist period, some commemorative elements established in the post-1948 period had become sufficiently rooted, indeed “traditional”, by 1989 that democratic governments sought to retain them. By way of example, the symbol of the New Bread that Hungarian Communists had added to the 20 August commemorations in 1948 remains a prominent element of St Stephen’s Day. Similarly, the rock opera Stephen, the king first screened in 1984 (and first performed live in 1983) continues to be televised on an annual basis. As this chapter has shown, the national day traditions of 20th-century Czechoslovakia and Hungary were characterised by various levels of continuities as well as ruptures. The various regimes that governed each country all hoped to impose their own commemorative traditions and historical narratives and to

 These included 17 November in Czechoslovakia, commemorating the “struggle for freedom and democracy”, and 23 October in Hungary, introduced in the early 1990s as a joint commemoration of both the 1956 revolution and the proclamation of the Hungarian Republic in 1989. “1991. évi törvény a Magyar Köztársaság Állami ünnepéről”, in Magyar Közlöny, 29 (1991), pp. 651– 652; “167 zákon ze dne 9. května 1990, kterým se mění a doplňuje zákon č. 93/1951 Sb., o státních svátcích, o dnech pracovního klidu o památných a významných dnech, ve znění pozdějších předpisů”, Sbírka zákonů České a Slovenské Federativní Republiky ročník 1990 (Prague, 1990), p. 661. After Fidesz’s rise to power in 2010, however, 23 October was – with the passing of the new Fundamental Law of Hungary on 18 April 2011 – redesignated as the exclusive anniversary of the 1956 revolution. This was part of a broader effort by the Orbán government to reframe Fidesz’s 2010 “revolution in the voting booth”, rather than 1989, as the moment of true “system change” in Hungary. For the specific article on national days in the 2011 Constitution see: Article J (c) on the national days of Hungary in the Fundamental Law of Hungary at https://www.kormany.hu/download/f/3e/61000/TheFundamentalLa wofHungary_20180629_FIN.pdf (12 July 2019). For Orbán declaring the “revolution in the voting booth” see: “Forradalom történt a szavazófülkében” http://2010-2015.miniszterelnok.hu/beszed/ forradalom_tortent_a_szavazofulkekben (7 March 2020).

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sweep away the old. Even so, most regimes remained conscious of the fact that they could not completely abandon previous traditions. At the same time, despite their parallel historical trajectories, Hungary and Czechoslovakia differed in their experience of establishing national days after 1918 – a difference that, as has been argued, originated in the divergent political, ethnic and religious configurations of each state. On the one hand, in the aftermath of the Treaty of Trianon, which deprived Hungary of its ethnically mixed border territories, post-1918 Hungary would be an ethnically homogenous state for which a clearcut and stable narrative of national history could be established with relative ease. On the other hand, Czechoslovakia was riven by a number of national and religious rivalries that impeded the formation of a singular, uncontentious and long-lasting historical narrative. To recapitulate, in the case of Hungary, the figure of St Stephen offered up a long and established commemorative tradition that represented a relatively unified national idea. As a result, St Stephen had a multivalent symbolic value and could appeal to Hungarians with wildly differing positions on the political spectrum. While the Communists attempted to erase him, especially under Stalinism, even they eventually saw the use of restoring his cult. In the lands that became Czechoslovakia, by contrast, the medieval figures to whom national days were later assigned had acquired more limited and in certain regards divisive meanings during the 19th-century Czech national awakening. Jan Hus was placed at the centre of the liberal nationalist self-image but continued to alienate Catholics. Despite his traditional popularity in the 18th century and continued popularity amongst Catholics, St John of Nepomuk also came to be an alienating figure for many Czechs, as he was transformed in the nationalist imaginary into a symbol of Habsburg domination. Though a potentially more conciliatory figure, St Wenceslas meanwhile turned out to be of only limited usefulness to the nationalists owing to his compromised credentials as an anti-German. Because of the contentiousness of each of these figures, establishing a national day calendar in an independent Czechoslovakia would be a lengthy, divisive affair. Nevertheless, interwar political elites were to differing degrees able to construct national commemorative traditions around Jan Hus and St Wenceslas, whilst also marginalising, in part even eradicating, the once popular cult of St John of Nepomuk. During the Second World War, meanwhile, Nazi officials appropriated St Wenceslas and claimed legitimacy through him, while the day of Jan Hus (and, to some extent, that of St Wenceslas) became one of national resistance. Communist rule would signal a more total break. St Wenceslas was officially rejected as a symbol that not only stood in opposition to the cult of Jan Hus, but also carried lingering associations of Nazi and Catholic reactionism. Despite initial Communist enthusiasm for Jan Hus, by the 1960s his national day

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too had been quietly dropped. As the Czechoslovak case shows, ruptures could be more easily achieved by 20th-century regimes where national traditions were less embedded and/or where they could not effectively unite national communities. In his epilogue to the present volume, Ritchie Robertson urges us “not to take period boundaries too seriously” – a conclusion that this chapter wholly supports. Dividing the “short” 20th century of Central and Eastern Europe on the basis of its political regimes’ chronologies can certainly provide a relatively neat organisational tool based on dates that are familiar to the wider public: 1918, 1939, 1945, 1948, and 1989.¹⁰⁸ However, as this study of national day commemorations has shown, it would be a mistake to assume the ruptures with which these dates are associated were really as total as their political engineers may have hoped. Even in as turbulent a century as the 20th, continuity and tradition remain useful interpretive frameworks. Even the most revolutionary regimes were sooner or later bound to engage with, indeed frequently to adopt and adapt, the traditions of their predecessors.

 Eric Hobsbawm defined the short 20th century as lasting from 1914 to 1991. See E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914 – 1991 (London, 2011).

Ritchie Robertson

Epilogue Some Problems in Historical and Literary Periodization Periodization, according to the historian Jacques Le Goff, is necessary, but “never a neutral or innocent act”.¹ That cannot be quite true. It is possible to divide a historical continuum up by its successive ruling dynasties, as is commonly done with Chinese history, where the Yüan are followed by the Ming, then by the Qing, who peter out with the “Last Emperor” Pu Yi in 1911 and are succeeded by the Chinese Republic and then by the Chinese People’s Republic. Insofar as they are neutral, however, such broad divisions are of little use in the writing of history, beyond offering the structure for a very elementary textbook. As Le Goff convincingly maintains, the serious study and teaching of history both require the fragmentation of history into periods.² These periods must have some analytical content. Hence, they must be not only descriptions but also interpretations of the past, and hence always open to contestation and rearrangement. Naming a past period can open it up to research in a new way and offer a new picture of the past. Under the influence of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the later Roman Empire was long seen as falling ever further from the lofty cultural standards of the age of Augustus and sliding into the cultural darkness of the Middle Ages. Nowadays, thanks to such ancient historians as Peter Brown, the later Empire, under the period label “late antiquity” or Spätantike, has acquired a distinctive character of its own, and its achievements no longer require an apology.³ Again, we still speak familiarly of the Renaissance, referring to the period from roughly 1450 to 1700. Yet as a period term, “Renaissance” was put into circulation only by Jules Michelet in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France

 J. Le Goff, Faut-il vraiment découper l’histoire en tranches? (Paris, 2014), p. 37. For an excellent introduction to the problems of periodization, see ch. 3, “Époques”, in K. Pomian, L’Ordre du temps (Paris, 1984), pp. 101– 163.  Le Goff, Faut-il, p. 47.  See P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London, 1971); A. Demandt, Die Spätantike: Römische Geschichte von Diocletian bis Justinian 284‒565 n. Chr. (Munich, 1989), esp. pp. 470 – 475: “Die Deutungsgeschichte”. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636000-009

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on 23 April 1838.⁴ His influence was enhanced by that of Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860). In recent decades, historians have come to prefer the term “early modern”. “Early modern” sounds like a neutral, merely chronological term, whereas “Renaissance” is colourful, appealing to the imagination in a way that some might think detrimental to serious study. How much duller Garrett Mattingly’s book Renaissance Diplomacy would sound if it had the title Early Modern Diplomacy. ⁵ But “early modern” is not as neutral as it may seem. It implies a teleology. “Early modern” sounds like an early phase of the “modern” period, stretching to the present. So, the “early modern” period is implicitly seen as a mere preparation for the present, and the term draws our attention to the features of the time that seem to anticipate our present and our recent past. To see how this matters, consider the historical place we might assign to Isaac Newton. Newton’s scientific discoveries helped to shape the thought of the Enlightenment. They revealed an orderly universe which could be described in mathematical terms, unified by the principle of gravitation. Newton’s method was strict empirical enquiry; he boldly declared “I do not frame hypotheses”. Thus, he provided the worldview and the intellectual method that would dominate the Enlightenment. He seems pre-eminently a herald of modernity. Newton’s contemporaries did not know, however, that he spent a great deal of time on the obsolete science of alchemy and on Biblical chronology. His studies in chronology were inspired by the conviction, common in his time, that the ancients had possessed a store of secret knowledge concealed in hieroglyphics and coded texts. He regarded the Principia Mathematica not as the exposition of new knowledge but as the recovery of ancient knowledge. The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians had known about the heliocentric system long before Copernicus. A scientific explanation of the creation of the world was given in the early chapters of Genesis, which Moses had written, using figurative language to suit the limited understanding of his audience.⁶ This account of Newton’s activities, recently set out by Rob Iliffe in his book Priest of Nature, plunges us into a Renaissance world of esoteric learning. If we understand Newton as a Renaissance figure, then his project of recovering ancient wisdom fits into a cultural pattern. If we

 See L. Febvre, “Comment Jules Michelet inventa la Renaissance”, in his Pour une Histoire à part entière (Paris, 1962), pp. 717– 729.  G. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London, 1955).  See F. E. Manuel, Isaac Newton Historian (Cambridge, MA, 1963), and especially R. Iliffe, Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 2017). On the popularity of astrology in the Renaissance, cf. J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance, tr. S.G.C. Middlemore (Oxford, 1944), pp. 314– 335.

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insist on seeing him as an early modern figure, a man of the early Enlightenment, then it seems anachronistic and anomalous.

I Ways of dividing time Any historical period must be imagined as part of a sequence, and thus placed within a narrative. A narrative, by definition, has a beginning and an end. The now standard method of historical time divides it into two mega-periods separated by the birth of Christ. This scheme goes back to the 6th century monk Dionysius Exiguus. Dionysius accepted the traditional date of 25 March for Christ’s conception and hence his Incarnation, so that his birth could be located on 25 December, and both occurred in the year AD 1. It was not until the 10th century, however, that the practice of reckoning time from the Incarnation became standard throughout Western Europe; before that, historical events and charters were dated by the regnal year.⁷ Although the loss of Christian significance is nowadays often acknowledged by calling the epochs BC and AD by the terms BCE and CE (Common Era), this scheme persists despite the inconvenient consequence that when dealing with ancient history one has to count backwards. Gibbon complains of “our double and perplexed method of counting backwards and forwards the years before and after the Christian era”.⁸ He prefers the Orthodox Church’s practice of counting from the creation of the world, which was supposed to have taken place on 1 September, 5508 years, three months, and twentyfive days before the birth of Christ. As he notes, this chronology was still used in Russia until the reign of Peter the Great. Peter adopted the Julian Calendar, so that the new year now began on 1 January instead of 1 September, and the year 7207 became 1700. Christian historians subdivided historical time further. One scheme, carrying the authority of St Augustine, was the division of history into six ages, corresponding to the six days of creation. The first age began from the creation of the world, the sixth age began with the birth of Christ, and was still continuing; it would terminate with the Last Judgement, after which we would rest eternally as God rested on the seventh day of creation.⁹

 See G. Declercq, Anno Domini: The Origins of the Christian Era (Turnhout, 2000).  E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. D. Womersley (3 vols, London, 1994), vol. II, p. 617n.  See C. A. Patrides, The Grand Design of God: The Literary Form of the Christian View of History (London, 1972), p. 18.

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Very often another scheme was superimposed on this one: the scheme of the four ages or four monarchies, inspired by the prophetic book of Daniel. In Chapter 7, Daniel recounts an apocalyptic vision. He sees four great beasts, and is told that these are “four kings, which shall arise out of the earth” (7:17), before the advent of the Ancient of Days. The last beast has ten horns, which stand for ten kings, and a little horn which destroys several of the ten. After the destruction of the fourth beast, the rule of the saints, the fifth monarchy, begins. The four empires were commonly supposed to be Babylon, Persia, the Greek conquests made by Alexander, and Rome. The last was sometimes extended to include the Roman Catholic Church; Protestants, including the Reformation historian Johann Sleidan, along with Isaac Newton and John Wesley, looked forward to its overthrow and sometimes to its supersession by the rule of Christ and the saints.¹⁰ Catholics could, on the other hand, interpret Rome as continued by the Habsburg Empire. The Enlightenment philosopher George Berkeley offered in 1725 a secularized version in which the fifth empire was a future America: Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way, The four first Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama of the Day; The world’s great Effort is the last.¹¹

The 18th century favoured a very different historical scheme with a strong sociological tinge, known nowadays as the “four stages theory” or “stadial history”.¹² Enlightenment historians inquired into the various stages through which humanity had passed leading up to the emergence of present-day civil and commercial society. The greatest single inspiration for them was Montesquieu with his L’Esprit de lois (1748). His example showed that a good way to study the nature of society was to inquire into the history of its laws. Hence the sharpest formulation of the four stages theory is found in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence. Smith explained to his students at Glasgow in 1762: “There are four distinct states which mankind pass through: – 1st, the Age of Hunters; 2dly, the Age of Shepherds; 3dly, the Age of Agriculture; and 4thly, the Age of Commerce”.¹³  See A. Kess, Johann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History (Aldershot, 2008).  G. Berkeley, “America as the Muse’s Refuge”, in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop, (9 vols, London, 1948 – 57), vol. VII, pp. 369 – 70.  A handy summary in K. Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England (New Haven, 2018), pp. 192– 196; full detail in R. L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1966).  A. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael and P.G. Stein (Oxford, 1978), p. 14.

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Each state led to different forms of social organization and law. These states or stages were distinguished by the dominant mode of subsistence, in contrast to the later Marxist theory of history which distinguished different periods by the dominant mode of production. The “four stages” historians aim to show how all the institutions and manners of a society result from their mode of subsistence and are interconnected, as in William Robertson’s systematic account of the Native Americans in Chapter 4 of his History of America (1777). The stages are nicely summed up in a letter by Thomas Jefferson, who points out that all four exist simultaneously in different parts of North America: Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our sea-coast. These he would observe in the earliest stage if association living under no law but that of nature, subscribing and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. | Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day.¹⁴

If Christian history was supposed to end with the Second Coming, what did the stadial theorists expect the future to look like? They were aware not only of the transience of all things, but of the tensions within commercial society that would put limits to its survival. They were conscious that wealthy societies, like that of ancient Rome, were prone to corruption. They foresaw the following course of decline: commerce leads to wealth, wealth leads to luxury and corruption, these in turn lead to popular discontent, revolt, and anarchy, and that in turn will be quelled by the emergence of an authoritarian leader, an Augustus Caesar, a Cromwell, or – looking ahead – a Napoleon.¹⁵ In the 19th century, a new way of thinking about history would prevail. Scientists revealed the deep past of almost unimaginably long geological epochs in which, according to the fossil record, life-forms had evolved, and many species had perished. As the remote past blurred into prehistory, so, with the spread of secularism, the future became matter for uncertain speculation. Human history could be seen as a narrative of progress or of decline. But historians moved away

 T. Jefferson, letter to William Ludlow, 6 Sept. 1824, quoted in K. J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 2008), pp. 378 – 379.  See D. Hume, “Whether the British Government inclines more to an Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic”, in his Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1987), pp. 47– 53.

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from large-scale narrative to focus on a new conception of the historical period, summed up in Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum: “every epoch is immediate to God, and its worth is not at all based on what derives from it but rests in its own existence, in its own self.”¹⁶ The position of a period in a large historical scheme now became less important than the investigation of the period itself. And the concept of a period was understood in a new way which eventually acquired the name “historicism”.

II Historicism The conception of a past period as an assemblage of interrelated products and activities has itself a history. An awareness of the past as different from the present can be found already in the Middle Ages and becomes strong in Renaissance humanism. The 16th century art theorist Paolo Lomazzo instructed painters of ancient battles to represent ancient arms and armour accurately by studying Trajan’s Column.¹⁷ The flowering of historicism, however, was located by the historian Friedrich Meinecke in the 18th century.¹⁸ With Meinecke’s help, we can identify a crucial turning-point in 1773. In that year Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published his play Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand. ¹⁹ This drama was inspired by the autobiography of a 16th century knight, Gottfried von Berlichingen, who was born around 1480, took part in various wars and feuds, got caught up in the Peasants’ War of 1525, and fought against the Turks under Charles V. His autobiography gave Goethe the material with which to write a German national drama, something his contemporaries wanted but were unable to provide. And the necessary dramatic form was suggested by Goethe’s enthusiastic reading of Shakespeare, partly in English and partly in German prose translations. From the history plays in particular he learnt how to bring a complicated set of events, including battles and sieges, onto the stage, and how to alternate public with domestic scenes. So, in Götz von Berlichingen he offered a concentrated

 “On Progress in History” (from the first lecture to King Maximilian II of Bavaria, “On the Epochs of Modern History”, 1854), in L. von Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History, ed. G. G. Iggers, tr. W. A. Iggers (London, 2011), pp. 20 – 3 (p. 21).  P. Burke, “The sense of anachronism from Petrarch to Poussin”, in C. Humphrey and W.M. Ormrod (eds), Time in the Medieval World (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 157– 74 (p. 169).  F. Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, ed. Carl Hinrichs (Munich, 1959), first published in 1936.  On this play and its genesis, see N. Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. I: The Poetry of Desire (Oxford, 1991), pp. 114– 25.

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panorama of Germany in the age of the Reformation. A monk called Brother Martin, suggesting Martin Luther, appears, we see how feudal violence is being superseded by Roman law, we witness the Peasants’ War of 1525, and we hear about the Turks threatening the frontiers of the Empire. The language is vivid, colloquial, energetic prose. The play met with an enthusiastic response from everyone except the Francophile Frederick the Great, who thought it even worse than Shakespeare. It also found an admirer in the young Walter Scott, who translated it, very inaccurately, into English.²⁰ It gave Scott a model for the presentation of a past epoch in vivid detail, as he tried to do in his historical novels. Scott went much further towards historical accuracy as well as historical colour. His novels have detailed historical appendices. And his house at Abbotsford contains an extraordinary collection of guns and swords, partly to assist him in getting the details right, and partly, of course, to indulge a boyish fascination with weapons. The Europe-wide vogue for Scott helped to spread the historicism, the fascination with past ages, that was characteristic of 19th century culture. No doubt reading historical novels that bring the past vividly to life has started many people on careers that led them to become professional historians. But historicism really is an epoch-making idea. It is a new way of looking at the past. An awareness of the difference of the past already existed, as we have seen, but historicism enormously multiplied the detailed attention to the material and mental worlds of the past. Jean Racine’s Greeks and Romans, and even his Turks (in Bajazet), observe 17th century decorum. Contrast the efforts made by 19th century historical novelists, such as Scott or Victor Hugo, to represent the past accurately – though of course they also use the past as a vehicle for modern concerns. Flaubert’s prodigiously detailed reconstruction of ancient Carthage with the help of archaeology in Salammbô (1862) is also an indirect critique of the luxury and corruption of the French Second Empire.²¹ Historicism has enormously enriched our sense of the past. But it confronts the historian with serious problems of method. The substantive understanding of a period – as not just a segment of time but one with a distinct character – has strong and weak versions. The strongest version has been called Hegelian.²² Coming at the end of a well-established tradition of German idealist philosophy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel thinks that ideas have primacy over external or sensory experience. Our world is really a world of ideas which are embodied  See G.H. Needler, Goethe and Scott (Toronto, 1950).  See A. Green, Flaubert and the Historical Novel (Cambridge, 1982).  See E.H. Gombrich, “In Search of Cultural History”, in his Ideals and Idols: Essays on Values in History and in Art (Oxford, 1979), pp. 24– 59 (esp. pp. 28 – 34).

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in physical and material existence. History as a whole, and all human activities, are expressions of a single “Geist”, mind or spirit, that gradually reveals itself. Hegel divides history into the Oriental, Greek, Roman, and Germanic worlds. Within these worlds, each nation is animated by a distinct Volksgeist or national spirit, which manifests itself in every aspect of life. The “Spirit of a people” is a Spirit having strictly defined characteristics, which erects itself into an objective world, that exists and persists in a particular religious form of worship, customs, constitution, and political laws – in the whole complex of its institutions – in the events and transactions that make up its history.²³

Each period, and each dominant nation, therefore, has a unity which can be found in all its cultural manifestations. Many people rejected this philosophical approach. Ranke found it insufficiently empirical. Marx condemned Hegel’s idealism and derived the shape of history from the development of the forces of production. Yet the idea that a period derives its unity from an indwelling essence was popular among German cultural historians well into the 20th century. A case in point is Erwin Panofsky’s study of the relation between Gothic architecture and Scholastic philosophy in the 12th and 13th centuries. Panofsky begins by laying his cards on the table: The historian cannot help dividing his material into ‘periods’, nicely defined in the Oxford Dictionary as ‘distinguishable portions of history’. To be distinguishable, each of these portions has to have a certain unity; if the historian wishes to verify this unity instead of merely presupposing it, he must needs try to discover intrinsic analogies between such overtly disparate phenomena as the arts, literature, philosophy, social and political currents, religious movements, etc.²⁴

Panofsky warns against an uncritical search for “parallels”, but says that “there exists between Gothic architecture and Scholasticism a palpable and hardly accidental concurrence”.²⁵ The lifelike High Gothic statues in the cathedrals of Rheims, Amiens, Strasbourg and Naumburg “proclaim the victory of Aristotelianism”.²⁶ Later, subjectivism, found equally in the nominalism of William of Ockham and the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, corresponds to the emergence of spatial perspective in the work of Giotto and Duccio, and to English Perpen-

   

G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree (New York, 1956), p. 74. E. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York, 1957), p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 6.

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dicular architecture.²⁷ Thus very diverse philosophical approaches are lumped together on the grounds that extremes meet, and jointly declared analogous to certain techniques of artistic representation. This seems a loose and unfalsifiable interpretation of the philosophical and artistic materials in question. Admittedly, rather than relying on a vague Zeitgeist, Panofsky seeks to explain the correspondences from a widespread ‘mental habit’ resulting from the diffusion of Scholastic ideas through education, sermons, and public disputations. But even if one accepts his initial claims, and considers this a possible explanation, it still seems incredible that philosophy and the visual arts should march in step with the precision that Panofsky alleges. One suspects that his ultimately Hegelian conception of a period’s unity has become the irremovable framework controlling his observations. Moreover, the correspondence Panofsky claims is not really a relation between equals. He “confers a certain primacy on philosophical thought”.²⁸ Thus he intellectualizes art history, again revealing his dependence on Hegelian assumptions. A weaker version of period thinking uses the metaphor of the collective mind of an epoch. Ernst Cassirer, in his classic study The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tells us that the “mind of the Enlightenment” assigned supremacy to reason: “The eighteenth century is imbued with a belief in the unity and immutability of reason”.²⁹ The problem with this metaphor is that it commits what has been called “the fallacy of the homogeneous past”.³⁰ We are to believe that every thinker of the 18th century upheld reason, Rousseau no less than Kant. But “reason” was a contested concept. David Hume wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739): “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”³¹ Moreover, the word Cassirer uses in his original text is “Denkform”, literally “thought-form”. This seems to imply an intellectual framework, a set of assumptions, over which the individual has no control. It seems to anticipate Michel Foucault’s notion of the episteme, meaning the set of a priori assumptions which make knowledge possible. In both cases there is the problem of how one “Denkform” or episteme changes into another. Another problem is agency. Cassirer formulates sentences in which the 18th century, “the age”, or

 Ibid., pp. 14– 16.  M.A. Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY, 1964), p. 161.  E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. F.C.A. Koelln and J.P. Pettegrove (Princeton, 1951), p. 6. Originally published as Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tübingen, 1932).  E.D. Hirsch, “Faulty Perspectives”, in his The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago, 1976), pp. 36 – 49 (p. 40).  D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition, ed. D.F. Norton and M.J. Norton (2 vols, Oxford, 2007), vol. I, p. 266.

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the 18th century mind, is itself the agent. But the collective mind is a fiction. There are only thinkers, who are constantly modifying their thought and its underlying assumptions. This version of historicism, the postulation of a collective mind, has proved remarkably durable. In his well-known book The Machiavellian Moment (1975), the historian of political thought John Pocock generalises about “the sixteenth-century mind” and “the late medieval and Renaissance intellect”. ³² As if these were not broad enough, he talks with equal confidence about “the Greco-Roman mind” and “the Renaissance mind”.³³ Yet these supposed collective minds are imaginary entities. At best they are a convenient shorthand, which can too readily be hypostatized into a supposed reality. Nevertheless, if used with caution, the historicist conception of a period remains valuable. Even if we discard the Zeitgeist and the collective mind as mere fictions that explain nothing, it is still necessary to think about the relations among different cultural products of the same epoch. We need to imagine them, however, not as exfoliations from some occult central principle, but as a network of correspondences and similarities. With that caution, we can give the past character and colour, and our eye can be sharpened to discover real interconnections. As a counterweight to the intellectualist tendency descending from Hegel, with its fiction of the Volksgeist and the collective mind, it is salutary to recall that the people who have especially maintained the concept of a unified period are art historians. They are committed, by their innate gifts and their professional training, to a sensuous apprehension of past artefacts. It is relatively easy for them to show and contrast different styles in architecture, painting and sculpture. Thus, Heinrich Wölfflin in Renaissance and Baroque was able to draw an illuminating contrast between two period styles. “Renaissance art is the art of calm and beauty”; it seeks harmony and proportion. Baroque art seeks to overwhelm and excite; it goes in for “intentional dissonance”.³⁴ The calm dignity of Renaissance sculptures forms an obvious contrast with the tormented bodies of the sculptures by Michelangelo on the Medici tombs. How far, however, can the categories of art history be transferred to the other arts, let alone to a period seen as a whole? Take the case of Rococo. The term was first used in the 1790s for an artistic style of the mid eighteenth century. The most concerted attempt to apply it across the arts has been made by Helmut Hatzfeld.  J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Republican Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), p. 4.  Ibid., pp. 32, 75.  H. Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, tr. Kathrin Simon (London, 1964), p. 38.

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Rococo art is delicate, graceful, exquisite, specializing in playful eroticism and delighting in the artifice of costumes and dressing-tables. Instead of the powerful passions of baroque literature, Rococo offers gentle sensibility. Hatzfeld defines the Rococo as “a unity of eroticism, wit, and gracefulness”.³⁵ This fits the paintings of Watteau and Fragonard, and the anacreontic verse about wine and love popular in mid-century Germany, but when Hatzfeld and his followers try to extend the term further, to Lessing, Voltaire, Pope, Sterne, and even Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, he seems to be categorizing for the sake of categorizing. Friedrich Sengle goes further in his biography of the novelist, poet and essayist Christoph Martin Wieland (1733 – 1813). The term ‘rococo’ no doubts fits Wieland’s erotic verse narratives, but Sengle treats Rococo as a period style which is the expression of a society and its mentality. Thus, Wieland’s early fiancée, his cousin Sophie Gutermann (later the well-known novelist Sophie von La Roche), was “a rococo lady”, and his eventual marriage to Dorothea von Hillebrand was a “rococo marriage”.³⁶ Turning a fashionable style into a way of life seems again to be overstretching a category or overstraining a metaphor. Even without that, the extension of an art-historical term to a whole period provides at best a handy label, but hardly a description useful for the historian. It underplays the diversity characteristic of any period. Thus, for much of the 18th century the dominant artistic style was the Classicism inherited from the Renaissance. The sensibility that found expression in Rococo art (as conventionally defined) coexisted with an emphasis on reason and nature, though, as we have seen, the cliché “the Age of Reason” is a massive over-simplification. The historian may be better served by abandoning the Zeitgeist model, in which a variety of cultural and other phenomena are supposed to develop in rough parallel to one another and opting instead for what I will call the “network” model, in which significant relationships can be found among phenomena in different spheres. An example, pointed out long ago by Arthur Lovejoy, is the correlation between Classicism in the arts and philosophical Deism – the belief that God exists and is the creator of the world but does not intervene in it.³⁷ God is the divine watchmaker who made the world and set it going. Both Classicism and Deism rely on the concept of “nature” as something guaranteeing that basic religious knowledge and aesthetic taste are in principle accessible to all humanity, and therefore claim that religious and aesthetic standards are uni H. Hatzfeld, The Rococo: Eroticism, Wit, and Elegance in European Literature (New York, 1972), p. 36.  F. Sengle, Wieland (Stuttgart, 1949), pp. 27, 141.  A.O. Lovejoy, “The Parallel of Deism and Classicism”, in his Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948), pp. 78 – 98.

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form and universal. Boileau in his manual of poetics (1674) tells his readers never to deviate from nature (“Jamais de la Nature il ne faut s’écarter”),³⁸ and Pope in 1711 urges his to follow nature – Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchang’d, and Universal Light.³⁹

This opens our eyes to how the concept of “universal human nature” pervaded the thought of the 17th and 18th centuries. A further difficulty with the Zeitgeist model in cultural history is that its concepts are not always easy to transfer from one culture or language-area to another. Romanticism is commonly supposed to be a Europe-wide movement. Claims for its unity may be based on the ultimately Hegelian concept of a collective mind which we have seen Cassirer applying to the Enlightenment.⁴⁰ Yet the unity of Romanticism is not visible on the surface. Lovejoy, almost a century ago, distinguished three different conceptions of Romanticism which resembled one another very little.⁴¹ His paper is still apposite. In painting, we would readily describe Caspar David Friedrich, Constable, and Delacroix as Romantic artists, yet their oeuvres could hardly be more different. The English Romantic poets were not considered a distinct group until the end of the 19th century. In 1882, Margaret Oliphant still divided the English poetry of the early 19th century into the Lake School, the Satanic School, and the Cockney School, represented respectively by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Byron, and Keats.⁴² The term Romantic came into use initially as a contrast to Classicism. The antithesis of “classical” versus “romantic” was formulated by August Wilhelm Schlegel in his Berlin lectures in 1801– 4 and borrowed by Coleridge in 1811. René Wellek argues against Lovejoy that “we find throughout Europe the same conceptions of poetry and of the workings and nature of poetic imagination, the same conception of nature and its relation to man, and basically the same poetic style, with a use of imagery, symbolism, and myth, which is clearly dis-

 N. Boileau-Despréaux, L’Art Poétique, Book III, l. 414, in his Épîtres, Art Poétique, Le Lutrin, ed. C.-H. Bouhours (Paris, 1952), p. 108.  A. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. J. Butt (11 vols, London, 1939 – 1969), vol. I, 246 – 247.  See H.G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (London, 1966).  Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms”, in his Essays in the History of Ideas, pp. 228 – 253. The paper was first presented in 1923.  R. Wellek, “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History”, in his Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963), pp. 128 – 198 (p. 149).

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tinct from that of eighteenth-century neoclassicism.”⁴³ But even a reaction against Classicism is not a reliable hallmark of Romanticism. Byron writes: Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; Thou shalt not worship Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey; Because the first is crazed beyond all hope, The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey.⁴⁴

Goethe in turn said of Byron in 1827: “Byron is not classical and not Romantic, but like the present day itself.”⁴⁵ He even perceived a deep relationship between Byron and the arch-Enlightener Voltaire.⁴⁶

III Problems of modernity and modernism How far does the historicist conception of a period help to clarify the terms commonly used for a more recent epoch: “modernity” and “Modernism”? “Modernity” is among the vaguest and (partly for that reason) most frequently used words in current intellectual discourse.⁴⁷ Like “modern”, it is also confusingly ambiguous. The history of the words “modern” and more recently “modernity” shows that they are employed to express the feeling that the present is different from the past; they need not say anything about the substantive content of that difference. The word “modernity” seems to owe its popularity to Baude-

 Ibid., p. 161.  Byron, Don Juan, canto I, stanza 205, in The Complete Poetical Works, ed. J.J. McGann (7 vols, Oxford, 1980 – 1993), vol. 5, p. 74.  “Byron ist nicht antik und ist nicht romantisch, sondern er ist wie der gegenwärtige Tag selbst”: to Eckermann, 5 July 1827, in J.P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, in J.W. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. by F. Apel and others (40 vols, Frankfurt a. M., 1986 – 2000), vol. XXXIX, p. 251.  On Goethe and Byron, see esp. S. Dumke, “Neither healthy nor sick: Goethe’s classical-romantic distinction revisited”, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 85 (2016), pp. 15 – 27.  For its history, see H.U. Gumbrecht, “Modern”, in O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: historisches Lexikon zur politischen-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, (8 vols, Stuttgart, 1972– 1997), vol. IV, pp. 93 – 131; H.R. Jauss, “Literarische Tradition und gegenwärtiges Bewußtsein der Modernität”, in his Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt a. M., 1970), pp. 11– 66. Jauss offers a different history, centring on Rousseau instead of Baudelaire, in “Der literarische Prozeß des Modernismus von Rousseau bis Adorno”, in R. Herzog and R. Koselleck (eds), Epochenschwelle und Epochenbewußtsein (Munich, 1987), pp. 243 – 268. Among innumerable studies of “modernity”, see especially Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982).

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laire. His essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863), on the drawings of Constantin Guys, includes a chapter La modernité, in which Baudelaire presents the word as a new coinage. He means by it the contemporaneity of Guys’ drawings, implying that the qualities that make art contemporary must be continually changing: “La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable.”⁴⁸ On the other hand, “modern” and “modernity” are often used to characterize the substantive content of a new epoch. Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote in 1893: “Heute scheinen zwei Dinge modern zu sein: die Analyse des Lebens und die Flucht aus dem Leben.”⁴⁹ “Today two things seem to be modern: the analysis of life and the flight from life.” He thus defined the paradoxical coexistence of naturalism and aestheticism as the substantive content of modernity. The much-cited passage from Baudelaire is often taken to mean that the substantive content of modernity is continual change, that modernity amounts to “a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing moment”.⁵⁰ But Baudelaire’s text is here being wrenched in order to make him affirm a conception of modernity derived from other sources. When the term “modernity” is given substantive content and applied to a distinct epoch, it is generally accepted that it refers to the state of society in the last century or so, and that its counterpart, “Modernism”, denotes a movement or rather a cluster of interconnected movements in all the arts, whose high point came in the early 20th century. It would be futile to attempt a precise definition of “modernity”. Its very vagueness is what makes it usable. But the following may find widespread agreement. In modernity, people no longer believe that the social order is determined by the authority of a traditional ruling class that in turn derives its legitimacy ultimately from God. God is dead; religious belief is waning. Society is now understood as fundamentally created by human beings, and therefore capable of being changed in accordance with human will. It undergoes recurrent upheavals as part of a process in which humanity is changing from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban species. These upheavals are intensified by incessant technical innovation. As a re-

 C. Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. C. Pichois (2 vols, Paris, 1976), vol. II, p. 695. See the careful interpretations of this passage by Berman, All that is Solid, p. 133, and Gumbrecht, “Modern”, p. 110. Translation: “Modernity is the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent, one half of art, whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”  H. von Hofmannsthal, “Gabriele D’Annunzio”, in his Gesammelte Werke in Einzelbänden, ed. B. Schoeller (10 vols, Frankfurt, 1979), Reden und Aufsätze I, p. 176.  M. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, in P. Rabinow (ed), The Foucault Reader (New York, 1984), pp. 32– 50 (p. 39).

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sult, modernity is Janus-faced. It offers liberation from the rigid social structures of the past. In theory at least, anyone can move to any social position. But its constant instability also engenders permanent anxiety and accompanies a feeling of powerlessness. Society may be ultimately a man-made order, but it has long since escaped from human control. The unpredictable vagaries of global capitalism prevent us from shaping our own lives and reduce the point of planning for the future. Modernity empowers its denizens in some ways, while disempowering them in others. The arts contemporary with these changes show a bewildering diversity, most obvious in the number of “isms” that appeared.⁵¹ Symbolist poetry asserted the autonomy of language; Italian Futurism wanted to annihilate the past and celebrated the inhuman energy of technology; German Expressionism found demonic forces in the modern mega-city; Dadaism offered an art without meaning – the list could be greatly extended. How is the cultural historian to make sense of this diversity? The study of Modernism has been enormously assisted, and to some degree shaped, by the collection of essays edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane in 1976.⁵² The old model of a collective mind appears in the chapter by McFarlane entitled “The Mind of Modernism”, but the “mind” here is capacious, various, and conflicted enough to provide suitable access to the essays that follow. Instead of trying to define Modernism through subject-matter or formal artistic features, the contributors write about the various urban centres of Modernism; about some of its well-known movements (“Imagism and Vorticism”, “Dada and Surrealism”); about some of its themes, with no claim that they define Modernism as a whole, such as the ‘crisis of language’, the modern city, the shifting nature of consciousness; and about developments in the genres of lyric poetry, the novel, and drama. The reader gradually becomes aware of a network of correspondences and similarities. So, instead of being offered any kind of formula for Modernism, readers have to work out their own understandings of the term. This could itself be seen as a modernist mode of presentation: instead of being made into passive consumers of a “readerly” text (texte lisible), readers take an active part in composing their own “writerly” text (texte scriptible), as when one works at making sense of Joyce’s Ulysses. ⁵³ The wider historical context of Modernism, however, appears only marginally in the Bradbury-McFarlane volume, whereas in a more recent and highly am See P. Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 2009).  M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane (eds), Modernism (Harmondsworth, 1976).  See J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London, 1975), pp. 189 – 190.

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bitious attempt to define Modernism it plays a much more prominent role. In an essay of 1993 entitled “The Problematics of European Modernism”, which deserves to be much better known, Richard Sheppard rejects the idea that Modernism can be understood as the expression of some inner truth (what I have called the “Zeitgeist model”) or defined by listing traits common to all its representative works. Modernism does have a unity, but that unity is not to be found on the surface of modernist literature and art. Instead, it must be sought in what Sheppard, borrowing the term from Louis Althusser, calls an underlying problématique, which exists objectively but is transcribed and represented very differently by different artists, depending on their diverse subjectivities.⁵⁴ The problématique is in turn that of rapid social upheavals. Here Sheppard, following the cultural pessimism of the Frankfurt School, takes a firmly negative view.⁵⁵ He quotes approvingly Peter Bürger’s description of the avant-garde as the “expression of a profound anxiety in the face of a technological system which had become excessively powerful and a social system which imposes extreme limitations on the individual’s freedom of action”.⁵⁶ Modernism is a “reflex” of social change, but it also “involved an active attempt to understand and pictorialize the complexities of that process”.⁵⁷ This bold attempt to explain the diversity of a cultural period invites a number of criticisms. First, it involves explaining the known by the unknown. The Althusserian problématique, whose objective reality is so confidently asserted, does not seem susceptible to demonstration or modification: it has to be accepted on faith. It is really no better founded than Hegel’s concept of the Volksgeist. Second, the historical context which gives rise to this problématique is described in a one-sided way. Sheppard appeals to the sociologist Émile Durkheim’s concept of anomie, the frightening sense of being adrift without any norms or rules, which is attributed to “modernity’s destruction of traditional communities”.⁵⁸ But he makes no reference to an equally important social theorist, Georg Simmel, who explores how the modern money-based economy renders life abstract and colourless, yet also liberates the individual from traditional

 R. Sheppard, “The Problematics of European Modernism”, in S. Giles (ed), Theorizing Modernism: Essays in Critical Theory (London, 1993), pp. 1– 51 (p. 11).  The classic work here is M. Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, tr. E. Jephcott (Stanford, 2002), first published in 1944 and in enlarged form in 1947. For a critique of its one-sided pessimism, see J. Herf, “Dialectic of Enlightenment reconsidered”, New German Critique, no. 117 (fall 2017), 81– 89.  Quoted in Sheppard, “Problematics”, p. 7.  Ibid.  Ibid., p. 9.

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constraints and permits the free development of the personality.⁵⁹ The impersonal modern city allows a freedom impossible in the stifling society of a village. A third problem is: which works count as modernist, if they are not defined by surface features such as thematic content or aesthetic form? Sheppard’s modernist canon includes all the usual suspects (Kafka, Proust, Faulkner, Mann, Woolf) and many less familiar names, but it also lists Forster’s A Passage to India among “major modernist texts”.⁶⁰ If Forster counts as a modernist, it is difficult to see who could be excluded. Sheppard starts from a familiar modernist canon, which he has enlarged by extensive reading; but he never asks how that canon was formed. And, contrary to his initial disclaimer, he does list themes supposed to be common to many modernist works; indeed, it is only on thematic grounds – the theme of a disturbing intrusion of the unfamiliar in the Marabar Caves episode – that A Passage to India qualifies for inclusion.⁶¹ Finally, Sheppard ascribes to Modernism a “changing sense of reality” in which reality is unstable and discontinuous. This is illustrated from the physics of Einstein and Heisenberg, to which “counterparts and parallels” can be found in “the fields of philosophical and literary Modernism”. Such a claim is familiar. It can perhaps be developed by means of the ‘network model’ which, I have suggested, registers similarities in different cultural spheres without offering to trace them back to a single occult cause. Even so, it must be remembered that scientific investigation moves by an internal process of problems and solutions which then generate new problems, whereas artistic development consists in formal innovation to convey changing experiences; it is not clear what meaningful link can be made between scientific and artistic breakthroughs. The assumption that there must be a link is a residue of the conception of a unified period, as defined in the earlier quotation from Panofsky. And in trying to explain the apparent correspondences between science and the arts, we are back with Panofsky’s problematic correspondences between Gothic architecture and scholastic philosophy. Panofsky appeals to “mental habits”, Sheppard to “similar patterns of thought”.⁶² Neither is likely to satisfy the historian. Period terms such as Modernism should not be discarded. As Panofsky says, we cannot do without them. But their usefulness is limited. They serve as loose organizing concepts, and they stimulate us to notice similarities across different cultural fields, even if they do little to explain those similarities. But it is fatal to

   

G. Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, 2nd enlarged edn (Leipzig, 1907), p. 360. Sheppard, “Problematics”, pp. 16 – 17. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 4, quoting S. Schwarz, The Matrix of Modernism (Princeton, 1985).

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reify them into objective realities which are to be explained by some occult entity, whether a problématique or a Volksgeist.

IV Beginnings and endings Granted that we need period concepts, and that they are neither objective nor arbitrary, when do periods begin and end? A rough-and-ready kind of boundary is provided by major historical events. For example, it is common to locate the beginning of the Enlightenment in 1688, the date of the Glorious Revolution in Britain, in which William of Orange was invited to assume the throne and depose James II, who was suspected of wishing to re-impose Catholicism by force. William invaded England, landing in Devon, marched to London and occupied it with Dutch troops until his rule was firmly established. This event had much wider significance. A monarchy based on the alleged divine right of kings was thus replaced with a monarchy based much more on popular consent. An institution resting on tradition, but no longer fit for purpose, was replaced by a more rationally chosen counterpart. So, 1688 marks not only an event, namely a change of government, but also an intellectual shift – a new approach to government that may be seen as inaugurating the “age of reason” (setting aside for the moment the inadequacies of this term). Putting the emphasis more strongly on intellectual innovation, it can be noted that the 1680s also saw the publication of Pierre Bayle’s pioneering assault on superstition, Pensées diverses sur le comète (1682), and Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687), which became widely recognized not only as a convincing explanation of the orderly structure of the universe but also as providing a template for theology and government.⁶³ The phase during which these novel ideas seeped into public consciousness can be called the Early Enlightenment, following a familiar model which divides periods into “Early”, “High”, and “Late”. Art historians speak of the “Early”, “High”, and “Late” Renaissance, German literary historians apply the same terms to phases of Romanticism (Früh-, Hoch- und Spätromantik); many other examples will come to mind. Another way to avoid implying an abrupt succession of discontinuous periods is to introduce the word “long”: thus, we are now used to the “long nineteenth century” (roughly 1789 – 1914). Jacques Le Goff, denying the value of  See R. Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London, 2000), pp. 132– 142; J.B. Shank, The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2008); G. Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978), pp. 97– 98.

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“the Renaissance” as a distinct period concept, has sought to redefine it as the last sub-period of “a long Middle Ages”.⁶⁴ Eric Hobsbawm has varied this model by writing about “the short twentieth century”, from the outbreak of the First World War to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.⁶⁵ Hobsbawm thus implicitly questions the common, usually unstated assumption that a century, which is really only a random sequence of years, is more than a chronological convenience but can have a distinctive character (as with Pocock’s “sixteenth-century mind”). While these terms are obviously useful, thanks to their flexibility, there may be more doubt about period terms that begin with “pre-” or “post-”, such as “preRomanticism” and “postmodernism”. “Pre-Romanticism” has had a successful career especially in French literary history. The term préromantisme, coined by Daniel Mornet in 1909, had a nationalistic purpose: it sought to establish a period of cultural history which was as authentically French as the preceding eras of Enlightenment and Classicism, and in which English and German influences were no more than catalysts.⁶⁶ The developments that the term designated, however, can be found outside France. Sentiment or sentimentality becomes a fashion, in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, as much as in the fiction of Marmontel and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. We find a growing interest in primitive and exotic cultures. Homer comes to be read not as a classical but as a primitive writer, like the illiterate bards that had survived till recently in the margins of Europe such as Ireland and the Balkans. Great excitement is generated by the discovery of a presumed Celtic Homer in the poems of Ossian, published in the 1760s by James Macpherson. Yet the more distinctive the culture of the later 18th century appears, the less satisfactory the term “preRomanticism” becomes. “No man was educated as a ‘pre-romantic’, that barbarous invention of literary historians”, says Elinor Shaffer.⁶⁷ Northrop Frye, proposing a distinct “age of sensibility”, points out that “pre-Romanticism” is anachronistic in imposing a teleology on its subject, as though Sterne, Cowper and Blake somehow foreknew the arrival of Romanticism.⁶⁸ It would be refreshing to escape from the illusory authority that comes from dividing time into centuries. An important attempt to do so has been made by

 Le Goff, Faut-il, p. 187.  E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914 – 1991 (London, 1994).  A. Minski, Le préromantisme (Paris, 1998), pp. 11– 12.  E. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem: the Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770 – 1880 (Cambridge, 1975), p. 9.  N. Frye, “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility”, in his Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York, 1963), pp. 130 – 137 (esp. p. 130).

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Reinhart Koselleck. In his introduction to a historical dictionary of political and social terms that has long been a standard work, Koselleck proposed the hypothesis that many key words underwent a crucial change of meaning in the period 1750 – 1850, which he referred to as a Sattelzeit or watershed separating the world of tradition from that of modernity.⁶⁹ The “saddle” here refers to the dip or col separating two mountains (though it is not clear whether we are to imagine ourselves descending one mountainside and ascending another, or painfully ascending through the traditional world to the col and then descending into modernity). It might be objected that the transition from one epoch to another is not an adequate period concept but takes us back into the difficulties associated with the prefix “pre-”. Koselleck’s answer, however, is that 18th century reflections on history inaugurate a new conception of the current period. What in English, in contrast to antiquity and the Middle Ages, is called “the modern period”, thus giving rise to the ambiguities touched on above, is in German simply the Neuzeit, the “new time”. In earlier reflections on history, it was assumed that nothing radically new could ever happen event would simply be added to event, century to century, until the end of the world; and hence particular events could be seen as exemplary of general truths.⁷⁰ Since the 18th century, however, the future has been felt to be open, and completely new events are possible. One example would be the French Revolution; another, though Koselleck does not cite it, the Holocaust; and yet another, perhaps, the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 (“9/11”). The French Revolution was felt by its actors to be a new beginning which required a new reckoning of time, the revolutionary calendar, and by observers, such as Edmund Burke, as a wholly unprecedented event. “All circumstances taken together”, wrote Burke in 1790, “the French revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world”.⁷¹ Facing an open future, continues Koselleck, we necessarily feel ourselves to be living in an age of transition which never reaches an end-point: “It is characteristic of the new epochal consciousness since the late eighteenth century that one’s own time was not experienced only as an end or a beginning, but as a tran-

 R. Koselleck, “Einleitung”, in Brunner, Conze and Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. I, pp. xiii-xxvii (p. xv). See the critical discussion by D. Fulda, “Sattelzeit. Karriere und Problematik eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Zentralbegriffs”, in E. Décultot and D. Fulda (eds), Sattelzeit: Historiographiegeschichtliche Revisionen (Berlin, 2016), pp. 1– 16.  Doubts about exemplarity can already be found in the 16th century: see F. Rigolot, “The Renaissance crisis of exemplarity”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 59 (1998), pp. 557– 63.  E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. by L.G. Mitchell (Oxford, 1993), p. 10.

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sitional period.”⁷² Thus the Sattelzeit is more than a bridge: it introduces a new sense of historical time characteristic of the ever-expanding and unpredictable Neuzeit. It should be noted, however, that Koselleck’s Sattelzeit is not a period within political history: its beginning and end are not marked by what are conventionally considered events. It is rather a phase in thinking about history – in the development of historical consciousness – and thus part of the Begriffsgeschichte or “history of concepts” of which Koselleck was a pioneer. Koselleck’s Sattelzeit has a partial counterpart in literary history. If we were prepared to revise our familiar categories and refrain from thinking in centuries, a very good case can be made for 1750 to about 1840 as a distinct period. This period already corresponds in German literary history to the Goethezeit, the Age of Goethe, roughly defined by his dates (1749 – 1832), and comprehending both Classicism and Romanticism, which were too closely intertwined to make intelligible period divisions. On a European scale, Frye’s age of sensibility could be seen to develop seamlessly into the period which in German cultural history is known as Biedermeier. Biedermeier, yet another term taken from art history, used to have mildly pejorative implications. It suggested that genre painting and evocations of domestic life were a reprehensible decline from the lofty standards of Romanticism. In German literature, the Biedermeier period has now been rehabilitated, and shown to have its full share of problems and conflicts, by the monumental work of Friedrich Sengle.⁷³ Mario Praz, a literary scholar who also wrote engagingly about art history, argued that the emotional values commonly called “Victorian”, which he saw as the English parallel to Biedermeier, are fully present in the literature of the early 19th century.⁷⁴ Wordsworth in particular is revealed as “a Biedermeier soul” and hence “the ideal poet of the Victorians”.⁷⁵ And Virgil Nemoianu has sought to extend the term Biedermeier to early 19th century European literature as a whole.⁷⁶ If it were not for the illfounded authority of centennial divisions, the “Age of Sensibility and Biedermeier” would stand a good chance of displacing “Romanticism”.

 R. Koselleck, “”Neuzeit”. Zur Semantik moderner Bewegungsbegriffe”, in his Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt a. M., 1979), pp. 300 – 48 (p. 328). For a similar idea, developed independently, see F. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York, 1967).  F. Sengle, Biedermeierzeit, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1971– 80).  M. Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, tr. A. Davidson (Oxford, 1969), p. 37.  Ibid., pp. 43, 45; Cf. S. Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, 1998).  V. Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier (Cambridge MA, 1984).

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I conclude that we should not take period concepts and period boundaries too seriously. Periods have two purposes: pragmatic and aesthetic. “Periods serve to render facts thinkable”, says Krzysztof Pomian.⁷⁷ So, for obvious pragmatic reasons, historians need to divide up their material, bearing in mind both the prevailing historiographical conventions (like the use of BC/BCE and AD/CE) and the particular needs imposed by their current project. But period concepts, especially the various historicist concepts discussed here, have a further, aesthetic value. They enable us to imagine the past vividly, to visualise past ways of living. For this purpose, “Renaissance” is better than “early modern”. But, just because a term such as “Renaissance” has appealed so powerfully to people’s imaginations from Michelet onwards, we need to remember that it is no more than a useful fiction, always subject to revision. Period concepts are a valuable framework for exploring the past, but if we reify them into supposedly objective entities, we will waste our time in pointless disputes about when the Renaissance began or ended, forgetting that the segment of time defined by a period concept always depends on our current needs. We then risk doing what Wordsworth warns against: falling victim to that false secondary power By which we multiply distinctions, then Deem that our puny boundaries are things That we perceive, and not that we have made.⁷⁸

 Pomian, L’Ordre du temps, p. 162.  W. Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. J. Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York, 1979), p. 77 (Book II, lines 216 – 19).

List of Contributors Alessia Benedetti is a PhD candidate in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research explores the reception of Dante in Soviet Russia. Jan A. Burek is a historian of modern Poland who recently completed his doctoral dissertation at the European University Institute, Florence. His research looks at Polish labour and gender history from a “transwar” perspective. Aaron Clift is a historian of modern France and Europe. He recently completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford, where his thesis examined anticommunism in French politics and society. Lucian George is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Oxford. His work focuses on rural political cultures in interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia. Aleksei Lokhmatov is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of History of Science of the University of Erfurt. He received his PhD from the University of Cologne in 2021. He is currently preparing a book under the working title The Clash of Virtues: Polish Scholars and Public Debates under Socialism (1945 – 1956) for publication. Jade McGlynn is Director of the Monterey Trialogue Initiative at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. She holds a DPhil in Russian from the University of Oxford. Her monograph, The Kremlin’s Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia, is due out with Bloomsbury in 2022. Ritchie Robertson is Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. He is interested in a wide range of authors and topics in the period from 1750 onwards, notably Kafka; Heine; Schiller; Austrian literature; and the Enlightenment as an international movement. Julia Secklehner is research fellow at the Department of Art History at Masaryk University, Brno. Her current work is part of the collaborative ERC grant project Continuity/Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe, 1918 – 1939 and focuses on the role of regional modernism in interwar Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Andrea Talabér is a cultural historian of Central and Eastern Europe. She received her PhD from the European University Institute in 2016. Since completing her doctorate, she has held fellowships and teaching positions in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636000-010

Index 1846 (“rabacja” massacres) 75 – 77, 81 – 82, 89 1848 (revolutions, emancipation of serfs) 28, 59, 61, 65, 68, 72 – 73, 99, 186 – 187, 210, 214, 217 1917 (Russian Revolution) 32, 50, 52, 100, 163, 175 – 177, 187 – 188, 191 – 192, 198 1918 (national independence, end of WW1) 30, 44, 50, 122, 125, 131 – 143, 145, 147 – 148, 175 – 176, 191, 163, 201, 204, 205, 214, 215, 219, 220, 229, 230 1945 (end of WW2) 13, 27, 31, 37 – 41, 44, 50 – 54, 58, 93 – 94, 154, 172 – 173, 187, 225, 230 1948 (Stalinization) 27, 38, 54 – 55, 57, 167, 173, 201, 209, 225, 226, 228, 230 1956 (de-Stalinization) 38, 45, 55 – 56, 162, 210 – 211, 228 1989 (fall of communism) 35 – 36, 38, 123, 142, 201, 214, 228, 230 Agriculture 26, 67, 78, 115 – 116, 234 Algeria 106 – 107 Alighieri, Dante (see Dante) Anarchism; anarchist(s) 72, 100 Annales school 150 – 151 Anthropology; anthropologist(s) 12, 92, 150, 203, 213 Anticommunism; anticommunist(s) 7, 29, 78, 92 – 97, 105 – 107, 108 – 110, 111, 115 – 117, 154, 172 – 173, 214 Anti-Semitism; anti-Semite(s) 35, 40, 78, 100, 107, 116, 169 – 171, 223 Anti-social 95 – 98, 117 – 118 Anti-totalitarianism 29, 95 – 96, 101, 108 – 110 Anti-urbanism 78, 102, 111 – 112, 115 Atemporality; atemporal 5, 7, 15, 19 Austria; Austrian Empire; Austro-Hungarian Empire 6, 26, 28, 59, 63, 69, 76, 82, 132 – 133, 138 – 144, 147 Avant-garde 7, 30, 122 – 124, 126, 131 – 134, 136, 141 – 142, 147, 177, 246 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636000-011

Banlieues 102 – 103, 112, 115, 118 Battle of White Mountain (1620) 218 – 219 Belatedness; belated 10, 124, 137 – 138, 141 Bennett, Judith 22, 25 Biedermeier 251 Bloch, Ernst 10 – 12, 124 Bloch, Maurice 12 – 13, 15 Bojko, Jakub 73 – 74, 81 Bolshevism; Bolshevik(s) 8, 32, 84, 96, 100 – 101, 161, 175 – 177, 179, 184, 187 – 194, 197 – 198 Book of Daniel 234 Borejsza, Jerzy 155 – 156, 162 Bourgeoisie; bourgeois 6, 73, 78, 112 – 113, 116 – 117, 161, 196, 221 Budapest 125 – 127, 133, 138, 208 – 210, 213 Café intellectuals 31, 127, 155, 157 – 158, 172 Canon; canonical 6, 17, 30, 120, 122 – 124, 136, 141 – 142, 145 – 148, 175 – 176, 195, 247. Capitalism; capitalist 10 – 11, 23, 26, 53, 67 – 69, 124, 127, 161 – 162, 193, 245 Cassirer, Ernst 239, 242 Catholic Church; Catholicism; Catholics 8, 31, 87, 102 – 103, 111, 154, 163 – 173, 192, 206, 208, 212, 215, 217 – 222, 229, 234, 248 Censorship 37, 187, 153 – 154 Central Europe 7, 30, 36, 120 – 126, 129, 136, 142, 147 – 148, 187 Change, cyclical vs linear 25 – 26, 124 Christian Democracy 163 – 164 Christian history 233, 235 Civilisation 9, 67, 70, 103, 116 – 117, 235 Classicism 241 – 243, 249, 251 Cold War 29, 94 – 95, 162 Collective mind 239 – 240, 242, 245 Colonialism; colonial 7, 106 – 107, 114 – 115

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Index

Communism; communist(s) 27, 35 – 41, 43 – 58, 64, 66, 78, 89, 93, 95 – 96, 98, 101 – 102, 107, 132, 155, 157 – 158, 172, 177 – 178, 191, 192 – 193, 195, 201, 212 – 213, 228 Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) 224 – 227 Communist Party of Poland (KPP) 37 – 38, 44, 46 – 49, 52, 56 Conservatism; conservatives 81, 102, 127, 134, 140, 177, 185, 191 – 192, 207, 221 – 222 Context (as method) 13 – 20, 28 Continuity and change (theories of) 4 – 5, 7, 15 – 16, 20 – 27, 93 – 95, 98, 124 Cultural schema 5, 19 – 20, 73, 91 Cultural transmission 17 – 19, 74 Curtius, Ernst Robert 19 Czechoslovakia 30, 32, 92, 125 – 126, 132, 140, 144 – 146, 201 – 202, 204 – 205, 209, 215 – 227 Dante; Dante centenary 18, 32 – 33, 176 – 177, 181 Dependency theory 10 Divine Comedy; Divina Commedia 32, 175 – 198 Dziś i Jutro (weekly) 154, 169 – 170 Early modern 232 – 233, 252 East-Central Europe; Eastern and Central Europe 11, 16, 40 – 42, 54, 61 – 62, 68, 78, 122, 125, 153, 201 – 204, 230 Emic/etic 4 – 5, 26, 59, 61 Enlightenment 9, 160, 180, 232 – 234, 239, 242, 246, 248 – 249 Entangled history 122, 125 Fascism; Fascist(s) 80, 98, 107 – 108, 141, 167, 169, 208 – 209 Feudalism; (anti-)feudal 10 – 11, 25, 28 – 29, 59 – 60, 62, 68 – 70, 75, 78, 83 – 84, 88 – 92, 190, 193, 237 Folk art 30, 125, 128 – 129, 138, 141, 147 Four stages theory 234 – 235

France 29, 88, 92, 93 – 94, 97 – 98, 99, 117 – 118, 123, 126, 150 – 151, 156 – 157, 237, 249, 250 Galicia 28, 59, 61, 64, 67 – 69, 74, 76 – 77, 91, 116 Gender 99 – 100, 114, 115 – 116, 120 Genius 175, 177 – 179, 182 – 184, 190 – 194, 196 “Gentle revolution” 155 – 156 Germany; German(s) 10 – 11, 95, 96, 108, 114, 138, 141, 143, 150, 180, 236 – 238, 241, 245, 248, 251 Gomułka, Władysław 49, 51, 55 – 56 Great Depression 67, 78 Habsburg Empire 30, 59, 122, 125, 127, 132, 140, 147, 206 – 207, 217, 234 Hegel; Hegelianism 149, 237 – 238, 240, 242 Herzen, Alexander 178, 183 – 186 Heuristic 2 – 3, 120 Histoire croisée (see Entangled history) Historicism 21, 23, 25, 33, 75, 197, 236 – 237, 240 Historiography 6 – 7, 29, 36 – 37, 39 – 40, 45, 58, 62, 149 – 153 Holidays (see National days) Horthy, Miklós 133 – 134, 207 – 208 Hungarian modernism 30, 125, 127, 130, 132, 134, 147 Hungarian Working People’s Party (MDP) 210 – 211 Hungary 11, 16, 30, 33, 125 – 126, 129, 131 – 134, 136, 146, 148, 201 – 202, 204, 205 – 215 Hus, Jan 33, 204 – 205, 215, 218 – 221, 223, 224 – 227, 229 Immigration 104, 116 Imperialism 106 – 107, 114 – 115 Intellectual history 4, 13 – 14, 30 – 31, 151 – 153 Interwar 6, 27, 29, 36 – 39, 48 – 49, 54, 57, 69 – 72, 80, 83, 86 – 91, 94, 140 – 141, 143, 145 – 147, 153 – 154, 156 – 158, 164 – 172, 207 – 208, 219 – 222

Index

Jew(s); Jewish 30, 35, 43, 46, 78, 91 – 92, 100, 107, 116, 126 – 128, 169 – 170 John of Nepomuk 33, 204, 216, 218, 221 – 222, 229 Kaczyński, Zygmunt 31, 154, 163 – 167, 172 – 173 Kádár, János 211 – 212, 214 Kościuszko, Tadeusz 81 – 83 Koselleck, Reinhart 8, 10, 12, 61, 151, 250 – 251 Košice 145 – 146 Kuźnica 31, 154, 163 – 167,172 – 173 Labour history 7, 25, 27, 40 – 42 Lenin-Chayanov debate 26 Lesznai, Anna 11, 30, 124 – 142, 144 – 148 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 19 Lhande, Pierre 101 – 105 Literary canon 175 – 176, 195 Managerial techniques 45, 53 Marxism, Marxist 10 – 11, 23, 25, 99, 114, 149 – 150, 152, 155 – 162, 182, 194, 235, 238 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue 216, 219, 226 – 227 Mass politics 74, 77 – 81, 91 Memory 13, 28 – 29, 32, 59 – 65, 69 – 78, 81 – 82, 87 – 89 Methodological nationalism 7, 30, 122, 125, 142, 147 – 148 Micro-history 27 – 28, 32, 35, 41 – 43, 58 Middle Ages; medieval 1, 35, 87, 90, 140, 190, 192 – 194, 196, 204 – 205, 215 – 218, 223, 225, 231, 236, 249 Middle class; classes moyennes 116 – 117 Minc, Hilary 49 – 50, 56 Modern Art 29 – 30, 119 – 124, 126, 138 – 139, 141, 142, 146 Modernisation 22, 28, 60 – 61, 63, 90, 92, 182, 193, Modernism 30, 33, 122 – 125, 127, 130, 132, 134, 138 – 139, 143 – 147, 243 – 247 Modernity 10 – 11, 63, 144, 232, 243 – 246, 250

257

Moravec, Emanuel 223 Multiple modernities 10 Narratives 6, 30 – 31, 75, 82, 84 – 86, 124 – 126, 130, 132, 135, 139, 142, 147 – 148, 151, 233 – 236 National days (holidays) 16, 32 – 33, 202 – 205, 222 – 224, 226, 228 – 229 Nationalism 81 – 85, 91, 154, 167 – 173, 198, 249 Nazism 11, 92, 108, 150, 157 – 158, 168 Nejedlý, Zdeněk 225, 227 Newton, Isaac 232, 234 Non-synchronism; non-synchronous 8, 10 – 12, 15, 141 Occidentalisme 107 Odrodzenie (weekly) 156 Painting 126, 129, 135, 142 Palacký, František 217 – 219, 222, 226 Panofsky, Erwin 238 – 239, 247 Paris 100, 102 – 104, 112, 118, 120, 123 – 124, 126, 140, 156 – 157 Parti communiste français/French Communist Party (PCF) 93, 95, 98, 102, 111 Patriarchy 22 – 24 Peasant movement 29, 66, 75, 79 – 91, 115 – 116 Peasant revolt/unrest 37, 63 – 72 Period boundaries 4 – 5, 22, 24, 26, 33, 35 – 36, 60 – 61, 93 – 97, 117 – 118, 119, 126, 148, 202, 204, 252 Piasecki, Bolesław 31, 154, 167 – 173 Pluralisation (of history) 6 – 8; (of time) 8–9 Poland; Polish 11, 13, 20, 26 – 28, 31, 35 – 58, 59 – 92, 149 – 174 Polish Marxism 154 – 162 Polish Socialist Party (PPS) 38 – 39, 46, 53, 55 Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) 35 – 36, 38, 40, 44, 47 – 53, 55 Political history 7, 27, 93 – 94, 97, 251 Prague 216, 217, 218, 219, 223 – 226 Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia 209, 222 – 224

258

Index

Racism; racial 103 – 104, 107, 115, 116, 170, 171 Ranke, Leopold von 149, 236, 238 Reception 18, 31 – 32, 88, 129, 138, 144, 148, 176 – 180, 184, 190 – 191, 194, 197 Regionalism 141, 144 Renaissance 119 – 120, 124, 160, 193, 232, 236, 240 – 241, 248, 249, 252. Ritual 5, 15 – 16, 20 Romanticism 90, 160, 179, 183 – 184, 189, 242 – 243, 249, 251. Russia 32, 52 – 53, 163, 175 – 192, 233 Russian culture 177 – 178, 182, 184, 189, 198 Russian literature 180, 198 Russian Revolution 52, 78, 100, 175, 198

Timelessness; timeless 18 – 19, 37, 144, 177 Totalitarianism 95 – 96, 108 – 109 Tradition(s) 16 – 18, 28 – 29, 31 – 32, 36 – 37, 39, 74 – 78, 83, 119, 129 – 132, 134, 144, 204 – 205, 207, 210, 212, 214, 216, 217, 218, 219, 225, 227, 228 – 230, 250 Transcendental 13, 15 – 16 Translation 157, 171, 187 – 188, 191 Transwar 26, 35 – 36, 39 – 41, 45, 55, 58, 94 Trotsky, Leon 10, 12, 175, 177 – 178, 191, 195 – 198 Tygodnik Warszawski (weekly) 154, 163 – 167

Sanacja 49, 51, 54, 71, 79, 157 Sattelzeit 61, 250 – 251 Schlegel, August W. 178 – 179, 242 Schlegel, Friedrich 178 – 179 Scott, Walter 237 Scouting (see youth movement) Secularisation; secularism 22 – 23, 235 Serfdom 59 – 92 Simultaneity of the non-simultaneous 9, 10, 12 Socialism; socialist 70, 78, 84, 154 – 162 Soviet culture 175, 192 Soviet literature 176 Sovietization 36 – 41, 43, 46 – 47, 173, 209 St Stephen 16, 33, 204 – 215, 216 – 217, 228 – 229 St Wenceslas 33, 204, 215 – 217, 220 – 224, 229 Stadialism; stadial models of history 2, 9 – 12, 149, 234 – 235 Stalinism; Stalinization 27, 37, 40, 53 – 55, 105, 173, 226, 229 Strike 55, 72 Subaltern 6 – 7, 61 – 62 Sunday Circle 126 – 127, 132

Uneven and combined development 10, 12 United States of America (USA); American 29, 53, 94 – 95, 234 – 235 Universals 21 – 22 USSR; Soviet 29, 32, 35 – 36, 38 – 40, 42, 47, 50, 53 – 54, 78, 92, 94 – 98, 101 – 101, 105, 108 – 109, 157 – 158, 166, 186, 191 – 195, 199, 210 – 211, 228

Taylorism 53, 57 – 58 Temporalities; “temporal turn” 31, 60 – 61, 151 – 154

8 – 12, 28,

Vienna 30, 125, 132, 134, 136, 138 – 147 Volksgeist 238, 246 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 11, 23 Workers’ self-management 49, 58 Working-class, working class 27, 36, 38 – 41, 43 – 46, 48, 51, 56 – 57, 97, 99 – 100, 102 – 104, 112 – 113, 115, 117, 188 – 191, 194 – 195, 198 World war 26 – 27, 35 – 37, 40 – 41, 44 – 45, 52, 57, 93 – 94, 125, 208 – 209, 222 – 224 Yellow peril 107, 115 Youth movement (peasant) 75, 85, 87 – 89; (scouting) 110 – 115 Zeitgeist 145, 149, 239 – 242, 246 Żółkiewski, Stefan 157 – 162