Examine the impact of the failure of the 1863 Uprising upon Polish Society.

        The 1863 Uprising differed from the previous failed revolutions in that it seemed to have a much more profound impact on the Polish society and people, and it is precisely these impacts which I intend to discuss during the course of this essay.  The 1863 Uprising is said to have started on the night of the 22nd of January 1863 by a group of young men who were trying to avoid conscription into the Russian army.  Many more men from various ranks within in Polish society soon joined them, which meant that in total more than ten thousand men had rallied around the revolutionary banner.  

The actual uprising also took a different front; it was fought using guerrilla warfare in the countryside, instead of as a full on attack.  The armed bands of revolutionaries held the countryside in such a cunning way that the Russians were powerless to defeat them.  This particular revolution also grabbed the attention of the majority of the western world.  Many countries sent their sympathies, Pope Pius IX ordered a special prayer, but few of the world’s real powers gave any serious assistance.  Although the Polish revolutionaries gave a good fight, the war ended rather abruptly when Nicholas Milutin arrived in Poland, under the orders of Alexander II, to liberate the peasantry, by granting them ownership to the land they worked.  No longer having the peasantry on their side, the revolutionaries were soon caught and punished, either by public executions or deportation to Siberia.  This forced the normal people to carry on with their lives, and to totally re-evaluate their way of thinking.

Before the Uprising, Poland had been in an artistic period called Romanticism.  This period is said to have started in 1822 with Mickiewicz and his ‘Ballads and Romances’, and Mickiewicz himself is said to be the literary leader of Romanticism in Polish Culture.  This movement was very much focused on the romantic idea of the repressed country striving for life under the evil oppressor, constantly revolting for their freedom.  They believed that the individual within this society could not be free while his country was still enslaved and this is how it differed from the western idea of Romanticism.  In the western view, the poet was there to lead their fellow kinsmen from ignorance into liberation and knowledge, but the Polish believed that the poet was there to stand united with their people to fight against the common enemy.  

The change that the failure of the 1863 uprising had was that it forced the people to reconsider their ideas and beliefs.  It forced people to see that a stance of outright opposition to the foreign powers had merely resulted in a far worse social and political position for the poles.  This change in thinking has become known as Positivism and is said to have been influenced heavily by the British Utilitarians Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, who believed in the “slow process of evolutionary change and organic growth rather than violent revolution”.  Positive thinkers proposed a more realistic set of goals and ideals for the Polish people to follow, which concentrated more on the country as a whole and the shape of the economy, rather than on the individual.  They tried to introduce the idea of working with the foreign power, in order to make a better Poland, than fighting against it in a hopeless struggle.

It was from this way of thinking that the idea of organic work was introduced.  The poles stopped thinking of the nation as a collection of individuals and started to think of her as an organism, in which all the limbs must be healthy and performing properly for the body to work.  They realised that “The culture and economic resources of the Polish nation were as yet too underdeveloped to sustain an independent state” and thus that they had to improve the trade and industry of the polish provinces before they could take her back as their own.  They decided that they had to “bring the nation out of the backwardness of the Russian Empire into the modern world”, but the only way to do this was by putting their grievances aside for the time being, and accept the conditions they were in.

The dire need for revolution slowly died down amongst the majority of the Poles, and a new bourgeoisie, a much need class of intellectuals also known as the ‘urban intelligentsia’, appeared who were against the beliefs of the old rebellious nobility.  Although things became calmer, with people deciding it was better just to get on with life, the hatred for the cruel hand of Russian rule was very much still evident.

This hatred wasn’t eased at all by the heavy political penalties placed on the Poles by the Russians.  The Kingdom was entirely swallowed by Russia and very little that was ‘Polish’ remained.  It was Nikolai Miliutin who Alexander I made the overseer of reform in the defeated Kingdom.  He was of the mind that it was the fact that the Poles had their own self-government that caused this unsettled society, so he took it away.  He then set about bringing down the hierarchy within Polish society, by improving the lives of the peasants through land reforms.  This destroyed the feudal order in the countryside as the clergy and gentry no longer had any hold over the peasantry.  He wanted to prove to them that life under Russian rule would be much better than under Polish, in hopes that this would squash any more attempts at a revolution.  

The punishment, however, did not stop there.  Soon the whole Polish education system was also taken over.  Teachers of Russian subjects were paid higher than those of Polish subjects and eventually Polish history and language were no longer taught.  Poles were no longer allowed to work within administration in the government as well as in many other jobs.  Most of their rights and privileges were taken away and very soon it began to seem like the kingdom of Poland had never existed.  But as the feeling of positivism reigned superior through of the majority of the people, most of the Poles just accepted it.  The author Stanislaus A Blejwas said it described the situation best in his book ‘Realism in Polish Politics’,

“The Positivists are reguarded as Political realsits who prefer legaltiy

to rebellion and considered the fufilment of basic civil duties as the

most important national task of the day”

The idea of Polish Positivism in literature is said to have started in 1866 with a young journalist, called Adam Wislicki, who founded a magazine called ‘The Weekly Review’ when the poles were still adjusting to the “new conditions of the post-uprising world”.  He wrote articles about current events in other countries and praised the effects of industrialisation, modernisation and woman’s rights.  

Although many writers of the time concerned themselves with writing about only that which can be proven, many would agree that Polish literature continued to flourish and it was during this era that the rise of the ‘novel’ can be seen.

“The social novel (…) took precedence over the poetry and drama of the Romantics”.

The authors turned their literature towards the economical and social themes that were prevalent in society and many attempted to analyse the nation.  One of the key authors of the time was Eliza Oreszkowa.  She was an avid campaigner for social reform and wrote about such topics as woman’s rights and the Jew problem.  It is often said that because of the influence of positivism in her work and hence the reluctance to believe in anything that can not be proven, her works were often “psychologically penetrative and showed style”.  Like many other writers of the time, such as Faraon and Prus, Eliza had a cunning way of getting round the censorship laws placed on them by the Russian Government.  Since artists could not mention the uprisings except “through veiled allusions”, many placed the problems of their modern society in other time frames or in other countries, for example in Faraon’s 1897 novel, ‘The Pharaoh and the Priest’ set in ancient Egypt, which “masked Polish political problems that could not be published in the form of a modern novel”.  Literature of that time was no longer concerned with Heroes and love stories, they were about educating the people, a means of letting them know that they were not alone and one day Poland would stand together united and strong, free of foreign oppressors forever.  

        Although the other two parts of the partitioned Poland were also under foreign rule, they were not treated as badly as the Kingdom of Poland.  This has much to do, I feel, with the 1863 Uprising.  After this event, completely changed the lives of most Polish people under the Russian rule forever.  It impacted on everything; from their belief structure, to the political position, to their Art, nothing was left sacred.  They no longer looked at life with the desire for revolution, but instead excepted their position in the world and tried to understand how they could make it better.  They no longer enjoyed the little freedom they once had, but this did not make them give up hope, it merely made them think about things in a different more realistic way.  Without the failure of the 1863 uprising Poland may never have reached this level of maturity.  I believe that it was of a direct result of this failure that we have to mature, culture rich Poland that we have today.