Apollo Korzeniowski’s Poland and Muscovy (translated by Ewa Kowal – revised by R.E.P.)
Apollo Korzeniowski’s Poland and Muscovy (translated by Ewa Kowal – revised by R.E.P.)

Summary/Abstract: Apollo Korzeniowski’s treatise entitled Poland and Muscovy has escaped the attention of scholars writing about the attitudes of Poles towards Russia in the post-partition era; to date only general summaries of the work have appeared in biographical notes on this “forgotten poet”. Presenting the essential idea of Korzeniowski’s “treatise-cum-memoir”, Czesław Miłosz rightly warns us against the rash tendency to ascribe nationalism to its author. In his turn, Roman Taborski, while granting the work “some documentary value”, defi nes it as “a sad testimony to a loss of perspicacity in this writer, who used to be so discerning in evaluating social phenomena”, adding that the treatise is “a historiosophic study which is imbued with extreme national chauvinism and continues the traditions of messianist ideology” by idealising Poland’s historical past and vilifying the Russian nation. In his pithy observation, Zdzisław Najder aptly emphasises the fact that “this embittered disquisition […] deals, in passionate tones, with Russo-Polish relations from the time of the fi rst partition” and with Russia’s place in Europe. Korzeniowski, Najder adds, shows Russia against the historical background of “a struggle between barbarism and civilization” as “a contemporary embodiment of Asiatic, Tartar, and Byzantine barbarism”, thus accusing Western Europe of a “cowardly or naive attitude towards Russia”.

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