ABSTRACT
Laurie Koloski Popular narratives of modern Polish history privilege the Poles’ heroic struggle against
foreign occupation and domination, and they often put intellectuals at centre stage. After all, these narratives affirm, it was philosophers who drafted the 1791 constitution that sought to rescue Poland from internal stagnation and external partition; poets who inspired insurgents to take up arms against tsarist rule; painters and novelists who stoked nationalist aspirations with their inspired renderings of victorious battles; historians who spearheaded a dissident movement that eventually helped bring down communist rule; and a Catholic publicist who became premier of the country’s first post-communist government.1 There are good historical reasons for intellectuals’ pre-eminence in such national narratives: in a country stripped of sovereignty in the late eighteenth century, and from a gentry class deprived of political and even economic influence (the partitioning powers could easily dispossess troublesome nobles), the intelligentsia had emerged to carry the banner of the stateless nation (Gella 1989, pp. 132-134, 139-144).2 As Jerzy Jedlicki has noted, they did so not by “awakening” a new nation, but by extolling the traditions of the old one. “It was precisely the preservation of tradition, the enrichment of the content of the symbols uniting the nation, and the imbuing of them with an almost religious significance which became the principal imperative of literature and art”, Jedlicki writes. With words and images as their tools, the intelligentsia sought to “nourish, organize and … extend to all, even to the still indifferent social classes, the feeling of nationhood and the desire for independence” (Jedlicki 1990, p. 43). Thus the intelligentsia saw itself, and has been seen retrospectively, as a decisive factor in the persistence
of a Polish nation and the re-emergence of a Polish state. Acting out of a sense of moral obligation, intellectuals earned recognition as a force of moral authority.
