Invented Traditions: Primitivist Narrative and Design in the Polish Fin de Siècle
Author(s): Edward Manouelian
Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 391-405
Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2697058
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Invented Traditions: Primitivist Narrative
and Design in the Polish Fin de Siecle
Edward Manouelian
Around 1900, Poland saw the outgrowth of a nativist primitivism, one that
consciously redefined the periphery as a site of cultural resistance. Primitivism,
as Colin Rhodes points out, "does not designate an organized group
of artists, or even an identifiable style arising at a particular historical moment,
but rather brings together artists' various reactions to ideas of the
primitive." I Within the subject ethnicities of central Europe at the turn of
the century, "ideas of the primitive" that were taking shape in the then stillemerging
discipline of anthropology were influencing various constructions
of national and regional identity. The nationalist imperative of the
new discipline was emphasized byJan Karlowicz, who, writing in 1906, argued
that "a people certain of its own existence may calmly study its own
folklore from a purely scientific point of view. Tribes deprived of their independence
and living in endless fear of suppression and decay, however,
must, while reflecting upon the nature and conditions of folkloric tradition,
consider practical questions as part of such inquiries. For whenever
reference is made to national peculiarities and attributes, there constantly
arises the question: to be or not to be."2 Karlowicz's remarks point
toward a deeply subjective primitivist discourse whose articulations, in critical
writing about the applied arts as well as literary representations of rural
popular culture, form part of what Eric Hobsbawm terms the "invention
of tradition."3
The present study examines a particular episode in this larger process:
the appropriation of a regional culture as part of a search for national identity
that underlay the wave of interest, around 1900, in the applied arts
and design of the Tatra highlands (Podhale), as well as other voices within
this trend who emphasized the more concrete and specifically local significance
of the region's culture. Among these dissenting voices we find the
remarkable short fiction of Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer, an important figure
of the symbolist Mloda Polska (Young Poland) group who was also a
native of the Tatra highlands. His collection of stories, Na Skalnym Podhalu
(In stony Podhale, 1914), lays claim to a direct authenticity in its representation
of the region's traditions, a claim vital to the discursive strategies we
will later examine in two stories from this collection. Nevertheless, there
is much that unites Tetmajer with his contemporaries: the project of apI
would like to thank the anonymous Slavic Review referees for their valuable comments
on an earlier version of this article, as well asJacqueline Glomski and Anna Baraniczak for
their patient help with various stages of research that inform it. Unless otherwise noted, all
translations are my own.
1. Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London, 1994), 7.
2. Karlowicz as cited in Helena Kapelus and Julian Krzyzanowski, eds., Dzieje folklorystyki
polskiej 1864 -1918 (Warsaw, 1982), 256.
3. See Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction," in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds.,
The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, Eng., 1983), 1-14.
Slavic Review 59, no. 2 (Summer 2000)
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392 Slavic Review
propriation that they undertake relies upon the notion of the primitive
as a kind of archaic cultural survival. It is precisely this notion that made
anthropology such a rich source of materials from which a past could be
constructed.
In this respect, the Polish experience parallels developments in other
imperial peripheries throughout Europe, where the cross-currents between
applied ethnology and contested nationalism intensified in this period.
In Ireland, for example, 1893 marked both the publication of W. B.
Yeats's folkloric anthology The Celtic Twilight as well as the foundation of
the Gaelic League, an influential linguistic revival movement, several of
whose members subsequently played a prominent role in the Easter Rising
of 1916.4 In Lwow (present-day L'viv), then a predominantly Polish urban
center of the largely rural Ukrainian province of Galicia on the eastern
edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ethnographic Commission
of the Shevchenko Scientific Society was founded in 1898 at the behest
of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a professor of history at the local university.5 At
the same time, Hrushevsky was influential in the creation of the (Ukrainian)
National Democratic Party, a populist movement that became the
dominant voice of Ukrainian nationalism in the years leading up to World
War I. This last example points up the often uncomfortable proximity of
competing nationalisms; here it is worth recalling Homi Bhabha's instructive
formulation of national identity as cultural artifice:
It is precisely in reading between these borderlines of the nation-space
that we can see how the concept of the "people" emerges within a range
of discourses as a double narrative movement. The people are not simply
historical events or parts of a patriotic body politic. They are also a
complex rhetorical strategy of social reference: their claim to be representative
provokes a crisis within the process of signification and discursive
address.... The scraps, patches, and rags of daily life must be repeatedly
turned into the signs of a coherent national culture, while the very
act of the narrative performance interpellates a growing circle of national
subjects.6
A primitivist reinvention of national tradition in Poland took place as
much as anywhere else on the pages of the journal Lud (The people), a
monthly publication of the (Polish) Ethnological Society in Lwow that
first appeared in 1895 and quickly became the periodical of record in its
field throughout the Polish partitions. The title alone suggests the generalizing
sweep of the journal's larger ideological agenda, a rhetorical strategy
that constitutes regional ethnographic items as part of a national ethnicity.
For a prime example of this metonymic frame of reference we turn
4. SeeJames Knapp, "Irish Primitivism and Imperial Discourse: Lady Gregory's Peasantry,"
in Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, eds., Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature:
Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism (Philadelphia, 1991), and "Gaelic League," in Robert
Welch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (Oxford, 1996), 208-9.
5. P. Odarchenko, "Ethnography," in Volodymyr Kubijovic, ed., Encyclopedia of Ukraine
(Toronto, 1984), 838-41.
6. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 145.
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Primitivist Narrative and Design in the Polish Fin de Siecle 393
first to an essay that appeared on the journal's pages in 1900: a lecture by
Stanislaw Eljasz-Radzikowski entitled "Zakopane Style" read in February
of that year at the Society's monthly meeting and published soon thereafter
in Lud.
The phrase styl zakopianiski already had a considerable prehistory by the
time of Eljasz-Radzikowski's lecture. Zakopane, a small village spa in the
Podhale region of the Tatra Mountains, had over the last quarter century
become the site of an extraordinarily productive encounter, from a collector's
point of view, between the Polish intelligentsia and the traditional
culture of a relatively isolated section of the country. A subgenre of travel
literature reaching back to Seweryn Goszczyn'ski's Diary of a Voyage to the Tatras
(1833) records the interest of nature enthusiasts and amateur folklorists
in the area. The special position of Zakopane itself, however, lies at least
partially in the fact that several sanatoria for tuberculosis patients were located
there toward the end of the century.7 Konstanty Stecki relates how a
handful of wealthier patients amassed large collections of local domestic
crafts including intricately carved washboards, spoonracks, ladles, buckets,
cheese molds, and spinning wheels.8 These collections ("the scraps,
patches, and rags of daily life") formed the basis of a regional history museum
(Muzeum Tatrzan'skie), the only one of its kind in Poland when it
opened in Zakopane in 1889. By that time, one of Zakopane's most influential
visitors was already formulating the notion of a Zakopane style: Stanislaw
Witkiewicz, the father of the dramatist and an essayist, art historian,
and controversial amateur architect, found in the wooden peasant huts of
the Podhale region the traces of an indigenously Polish ur-style: "perhaps
the mountain people, locked in the depths of the valleys, cut off from the
world, have preserved longer than anywhere else the most ancient general
form specific to the mountainous regions of Poland?"9 By the end of the
century, Witkiewicz had designed a handful of buildings in the vicinity of
Zakopane, examples of an eclectic neo-vernacular trend in east European
architecture, inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement but drawing as well
on local ethnographic research.'0 The first, and perhaps most literal in its
relation to regional sources among them, the villa "Koliba" (Shepherd's
hut, 1893), served as a self-conscious attempt at shaping a national style.'1
Witkiewicz designed the villa's interiors (including stoves, utensils, metal
fittings, door handles, and keyhole attachments) on patterns documented
from among the region's mountain folk. Although subsequent owners substantially
altered Koliba's decor, recently, with the opening of the Museum
of Zakopane Style, which has been housed in the villa since 1993, there
7. Konstanty Stecki, "Pocza4tki kolekcjonerctwa na Podhalu," Lud 53 (1969): 235-36.
8. Ibid.
9. As quoted in Zbigniew Mozdzierz, "Koncepcja stylu narodowego Stanislawa Witkiewicza
ijej realizacja," in Zbigniew Mozdzierz, ed., Stanislaw Witkiewicz: Czlowiek-ArtystaMysliciel
(Zakopane, 1997), 310.
10. Adam Milobqdzki, "Architecture in Wood: Technology, Symbolic Content, Art,"
Artibus et Historiae 10, no. 19 (1989): 200-204.
11. Zbigniew Mozdzierz, "Styl zakopiafiski w architekturze," in Jerzy Roszkowski, ed.,
Regionalizm-Regiony-Podhale (Zakopane, 1995), 31-33.
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394 Slavic Review
has been an approximate restoration of period furnishings designed by
Witkiewicz and his circle, together with exhibits of roughly contempo
peasant crafts from the Podhale region.
The actual makers of those crafts remain rather indistinctly in the
background of Eljasz-Radzikowski's article, a work whose overriding aim
is to inscribe the region's culture within a larger nationalist myth of origin.
For Eljasz-Radzikowski, Podhale's significance is not only architectural but
also philological: he describes the local inhabitants as having "preserved
the language of the forefathers, maintaining the memory of years long
past in living tradition."1I2 This reading transforms the Tatra foothills, often
considered a borderland, into the site of an archaic precursor of a national
Polish culture. Moreover, the problem of ethnic identity serves as
a point of departure: Eljasz-Radzikowski begins the piece by defensively
rejecting earlier theories of Mongol influences in the region dating from
the incursions of the thirteenth century (and passing over in silence the
centuries-long presence of nomadic Gypsy encampments in the region as
well as traces of Slovak and Romanian emigration from the southern Carpathians
from the seventeenth century and earlier). Instead, he presents
an image of ethnic homogeneity as well as cultural isolation, describing
the area as a "microcosm of the ancient Polish people" (mikrokosmos dawnego
ludu polskiego), one that is "enclosed by forests and secluded from the
leveling effect of civilization." 13 Yet, the inroads of civilization had made
themselves felt even here, as Eljasz-Radzikowski goes on to admit, perhaps
having in mind the first railway connection between Zakopane and Krakow
that had just opened in 1899. In the face of this, he raises the specter
of cultural devastation that had recently taken place among the indigenous
peoples of the North American plains, in Africa, and elsewhere as a
prelude to his account of the diverse mixture of conservation work and
creative invention that had developed over the past decade under the
term styl zakopianiski. This project assumes for him the outlines of what has
since come to be known as salvage ethnography, and as such a national
imperative for a nation whose political boundaries had yet to be recovered.
As a supposedly pristine repository of vernacular style, the Podhale
region acquires a powerful metonymic significance in the new redaction
of national myth, a fact underlined by the folklorisms Eljasz-Radzikowski
employs in summing up the area's importance: "a culture of long standing,
preserved in a treasury, locked by seven magic keys, beyond the mountains,
beyond the forests-has become the patrimony of the entire people"
(-kultura dawna, przechowana w skarbnicy zamknietej na siedem klucz6w, za
g6rami, za lasami-stala sie dorobkiem narodu calego). 14
Eljasz-Radzikowski's essay is interesting precisely for the way in which
it gives voice to the atavistic yearnings of nationalist culture, an anxious
search for temporally distant antecedents that validate the narrative of the
modern nation. That Witkiewicz, Eljasz-Radzikowski, and others found
12. Stanislaw Eljasz-Radzikowski, "Styl zakopiaiiski," Lud 6, no. 6 (1900): 174.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 175.
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Primitivist Narrative and Design in the Polish Fin de Siecle 395
what they were looking for around Zakopane has much to do with the ethnographic
prism through which they approached the culture of the region.
The influence of British anthropologist Edward Tylor's "survival"
theory, the notion that past customs of "civilized" peoples can be reconstructed
from the current practices of the less civilized, is evident here,
particularly in its conflation of the archaic and the primitive. To quote
from Tylor's Primitive Culture, published in 1871 and translated into Polish
in the late 1890s:
By comparing the various stages of civilization among races known to history,
with the aid of archaeological inference from the remains of prehistoric
tribes, it seems possible to judge in a rough way of an early condition
of man, which from our point of view is to be regarded as a primitive condition,
whatever yet earlier state may in reality have lain behind it. This
hypothetical primitive condition corresponds in a considerable degree
to that of certain elements of civilization, which seem remains of an early
state of the human race at large.... Survival in culture, placing all along
the course of advancing civilization way-marks full of meaning to those
who can decipher their signs, even now sets up in our midst primaeval
monuments of barbaric thought and life. Its investigation tells strongly in
the view that the European may find among the Greenlanders or Maoris
many a trait or reconstructing the picture of his own primitive ancestors. 15
The purveyors of styl zakopian'ski hardly needed to look so far afield; both
observer and object of inquiry are indigenous from the point of view of
nationalist discourse, a fact that allows the former to claim the latter as
part of an invented national tradition. And as we will see, Tylor's theory
informs a specifically primitivist appropriation of vernacular culture taking
place in Poland (in fact, throughout central Europe) at the same time
Primitive Culture was being translated, reviewed, and popularized there at
the turn of the century.
Tylor's influence comes to the fore in the final section of EljaszRadzikowski's
essay, where the latter formulates the importance of ornament
and the significance of primitive design. For him, vernacular
forms reach back into the depths of prehistory almost by definition. He
argues that
the elements of original motifs are not the result of an instant, they are
for the most part inheritances of primeval times [oddziedziczone nabytki z
czas6w prastarych]; let us but look at the wealth of ornamentation, which
can be found as early as the epoch of the caveman. At the dawn of humanity
there already appears a tendency toward adornment, toward searching
for an outlet for the internal impulses of the soul, toward the satisfaction
of aesthetic needs. That which we then see, those various arrangements
of lines, the combination of ornament, must have had certain rules, certain
paths, by means of which they took shape. This is yet another aspect
of folk art, this philosophy of line and form, why it took these and
not other directions, why these and not other decorative motifs.'6
15. Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1920), 21.
16. Eljasz-Radzikowski, "Styl zakopiaiiski," 186-87.
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396 Slavic Review
Eljasz-Radzikowski's speculations range freely back and forth in time,
unself-consciously eliding prehistoric forms with the work of contemporary
craftsmen. The evolutionary thinking underlying this passage also
owes something to the school that developed around the ideas of Gottfried
Semper, author of Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts (1861), whos
followers, as Robert Goldwater points out, "basing themselves in large part
on the earliest ornamental motifs they knew, which were geometric ... assumed
that the most stylized, non-naturalistic period of any art, its most
'geometric' phases, was necessarily the oldest, since it lay nearest to its
original determination by the purely technical necessity of the craft."'17
But whereas Semper's approach assumes a bias against abstraction, considering
such technique primitive in the most literal and pejorative sense
of the word, Eljasz-Radzikowski and his circle appropriate the primitive as
a means of access to the archaic.
But what of the objects themselves? We need to place EljaszRadzikowski's
remarks on ornament as cultural survival in the context
of the local crafts tradition he intended to popularize and preserve. The
Podhale region, indeed the entire Tatra foothills, developed as an especially
rich source of wood carving due to the variety of the surrounding
forests as well as, at least up until recent times, widespread pastoralism.
Shepherds had ample time to refine their skills as carvers, turning simple
branches into ingeniously anthropomorphized walking sticks or staffs and
eventually abstracting patterns of ornament applicable to all manner of
domestic tools and implements. A wooden beehive from the Podhale region
(see figure 1), inscribed with the year 1899, displays engraved geometric
and plant-derived designs common to the region. The stylized
sprout motifs are known as ostrewki (spruce seedlings). Wiadyslaw Matlakowski
systematically illustrated the variety of the area's popular ornament
in his Zdobienie i sprzet ludu polskiego na Podhalu (Ornamentation and implements
of the Polish people in Podhale). Published posthumously in
1901, the volume contains numerous photographs, as well as illustrative
sketches by Witkiewicz pere as well as others. In introducing the section on
plant motifs, Matlakowski notes that they tend to develop as certain frequently
repeated forms that, having been adopted as part of the vocabulary
of a region's ornament, become frozen into stereotypes. According to
Matlakowski, these motifs "give the impression that they were not copied
from local plants, but rather inherited and relayed from generation to
generation; these traits, plus a certain awkwardness, impart an antique,
archaic character." 18 Matlakowski includes in his book a photograph of an
engraved wooden beehive similar to the one illustrated here. Viewing it in
light of the accompanying critical text dramatizes how much at odds Matlakowski
is with both Semper and Eljasz-Radzikowski in his view of the historical
development of vernacular tradition. For Matlakowski abstraction
is not so much cultural survival as the accumulated result of a process
17. Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 18.
18. Wladyslaw Matlakowski, Zdobienie i sprzet ludu polskiego na Podhalu (Warsaw,
1901), 32.
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Primitivist Narrative and Design in the Polish Fin de Siecle 397
*404 p,- y
Figure 1. Wooden beehive from the Podhale region
(part of the collection of the Tatra Museum
mn Zakopane).
Photo from J6zef Grabowski, Sztuka Ludowa: Formy i regiony
w Po1sce (Warsaw, 1967), 302.
of condensation and simplification of what may have originally been
more nearly naturalistic sources. His remark above to the effect that the
primitive "imparts" a sense of the archaic betrays a considerable awareness
of how the urban intellectual observer reads the objects of ethnology,
a critical distance from the position of his contemporaries such as
Eljasz-Radzikowski who hurriedly conflated the artistic production of the
gorale (mountain peasant) with a hypothetical microcosm of primeval Polish
culture.
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398 Slavic Review
Matlakowski's book is, for the most part, a densely factual account of
the technical aspects of carving, design, and ornament, concluding with
an encyclopedic series of drawings that catalogue various patterns of ornament
and the domestic objects with which they are associated. At the same
time, the influence of contemporary ethnological theory makes itself felt
here as well. The work breaks ornament down into three basic types: geometric,
plant, and animal/human. In the applied art of the mountain
people, animal and human motifs play an important role: Matlakowski
notes in particular the use of animal and human heads as decorative elements
for a variety of implements. As if in reference to the staffs mentioned
above, he describes "remarkable ... archaic heads, in peculiar hats,
with distinctive facial expressions" and speculates that at an earlier time
they must have been widespread.'9 He fails to specify why this should be
so, simply because the Tylorian assumption is clear: the "archaic" heads
are a cultural survival, an embodiment of the latent animism that, according
to late nineteenth-century ethnological theory, shaped the worldview
of the primitive.
In Primitive Culture, Tylor posits animism, the belief that everything is
endowed with a soul, as a fundamental and universal stage that, in the embryonic
development of religious thought, precedes not only the conceptualization
of gods, but also the cult of ancestors. If we return again to the
pages of Lud, we find in the issues for 1900 a lengthy four-part essay
devoted in large part to Tylor's recently translated work under the title
"Primitive Philosophy-Animism," by Jan Witort. The article not only
indicates the scope of Tylor's influence at the time, it also provides an example
of the kind of popularization of ethnological theory that grounds
primitivism in both design and literature. Witort begins with the etymology
of the term itself (from the Latin anima [soul]) and then moves to a
discussion of how various ethnic groups have defined the nature of the
soul. Animism, as envisioned by Tylor and others, implies, from the point
of view of the "civilized" observer, a radical redefinition of the boundaries
of the Self and the Other, a point that Witort emphasizes in the following
passage:
Undoubtedly-the eating of souls confers upon their consumers those
qualities that the one eaten possessed; for the primitive mentality did not
in any way distinguish man from animals, plants, and inanimate objects,
since everything lives and possesses its own soul; consequently primitive
man would eat a part of his enemy's body in order to possess his courage,
prowess, and agility, in the same way he would eat the heart of a bison, in
order to acquire the strength of that animal.20
This extraordinary displacement and diffusion of the human subject underlies
primitivism's animist teleology.
A particularly striking literary appropriation of animism occurs in
a short story by Kazimierz Tetmajer entitled "On" (He). An episode conveyed
largely from the perspective of the bear, the work relates the depredations
visited upon mountain flocks by a bear, whom the herdsmen
19. Ibid., 40.
20. Jan Witort, "Filozofia pierwotna. (A-nimizm.)," Lud 6, no. 1 (1900): 17-18.
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Primitivist Narrative and Design in the Polish Fin de Siecle 399
eventually trap and fell. First published in 1906, the story forms part of
a diverse collection of fictional narratives (tales, anecdotes, naturalistic
sketches) known as In Stony Podhale. From 1903 to 1910 Tetmajer published
five installments in this series, finally compiling an integral edition
that appeared in 1914. This single volume included further material written
since 1910, as well as color reproductions of impressionistic Tatra
landscapes by Leon Wyczolkowski and ornamental motifs abstracted from
local design by Wlodzimierz Konieczny. Similar to those documented by
Matlakowski, these motifs appear, scroll-like, at the beginning and end of
each text. Regional applied art thus frames the narrative in a way that
graphically suggests the proximity of these tales to another rural craft
tradition: storytelling. Significantly, the initial publication of the Podhale
cycle provoked at least one charge of plagiarism, to the effect that the stories
were in fact ethnographic transcriptions passed off as original literary
work.2' In the introduction to the 1914 edition, Tetmajer vehemently
insisted on the originality of In Stony Podhale, asserting moreover that his
writing had nothing to do with present-day mountaineers. Rather, his interest
lay in their ancestors:
Those not among the merely intelligent but rather the supremely intelligent
highlanders, who think and say that "this is written about them,"
are thoroughly mistaken. This is written from the imagination and as a
representation of their ancestors, forefathers, and grandfathers, perhaps
even of their fathers here and there, but not of them. There is nothing
here in common with today's vogue for the mountains and Zakopane.22
In fact contemporary critics had already drawn attention to the originality
of Tetmajer's project: two years before, in 1912, Jan Lorentowicz, writing
in the Warsaw monthly Sfinks (Sphinx) emphasized precisely this archaic
quality of the collection as a whole. Most of the pieces are in fact set in
an indefinite past, often as much as a century before even an indirect
reference to historical time. Tetmajer's accomplishment, according to
Lorentowicz, lies not in the documentation of folklore, but rather in the
appropriation of both regional dialect and the conventions of an oral
narrative tradition, which he has then used as the basis of what we might
retrospectively recognize as a kind of primitivist fiction. Lorentowicz very
suggestively relates the archaizing tendencies of Tetmajer's writing to the
naturalistic metaphor of man as wild beast:
That which has most deeply occupied Tetmajer in the highland past is
also that which determines the secret of his artistic success: elementarity
[iywioto?5]. He has imagined a life very close to nature, scattered among
the mountains, independent to the point of folly, brave and impudent,
like that of solitary animals [jak u zwierzqt-samotnik6w] .23
Moreover, Lorentowicz's remarks throw into relief what Leslaw Tatarowski
refers to as the "anthropological argumentation" inherent throughout In
21. SeeJacek Kolbuszewski, "Na Skalnym Podhalu Kazimierza Tetmajera: Pr6ba nowego
odczytania,"injacekKolbuszewski, ed., G6ry-literatura-kultura (Wroclaw, 1996), 105-6.
22. Kazimierz Tetmajer, Na Skalnym Podhalu (Krak6w, 1914), vi.
23. Jan Lorentowicz, "Kaziemierz Tetmajer (W dwudziestopiPciolecie tw6rczosci poetyckiej),"
Sfinks 5, no. 17 (1912): 12-13. Emphasis in the original.
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400 Slavic Review
Stony Podhale, the
ticularly Tylor's t
turn suggests above all how far removed Tetmajer's writing could be from
anything resembling folkloric transcription, and how much his representation
of the traditional local culture of the Tatra region draws upon contemporary
ethnological notions of the primitive.
In Tetmajer's "He," narrative structure enacts the essential premise of
animism: an omniscient narrator limns the sensory impressions of a bear
in the highland forest, particularly its awareness of the gradual encroachments
of local herders. As the title suggests, Tetmajer renders the bear as
a mythic being, one who remains constantly in the foreground of the
sketch. The bear, and, by extension, nature itself, take on a form of consciousness,
while it is the human characters, the unnamed hunters, who
loom in the far distance until the story's end.
In the glistening moon in the vicinity of Bare Peaks he stood, resembling
a black eye, and looked down upon the empty ravine. And felt himself
mighty and invincible, like the strong warm Tatra wind or like thunder
which nothing could level. And in the late autumn sun he toppled
over among the hyacinths, among the grassy knolls; along the enormous
gleaming grasses he resembled a spruce log, he himself most powerful,
like a muffled winter night or an early frost that cuts everything to ice.
And the quiet empty forests were again his undivided domain.25
This pantheistic meditation on the bear's mastery over its environment follows
a scene of graphic violence, where the bear runs amok among sheep
brought to graze in highland pasture, killing several before the herdsmen
manage to drive off the intruding predator. Yet in a larger sense it is the
herdsmen who are the intruders in a savage landscape of which the bear
is an intrinsic part; in the passage above, Tetmajer, imitating the rhetoric
of the storyteller, repeatedly resorts to expansive similes whose accumulation
dramatizes the animistic notion of the bear as an ineluctable force of
an anthropomorphized nature. Moreover, their specific content suggests
the animal's mythic resonance. Comparing the bear to thunder (piorun)
inevitably recalls local pagan mythology: the head of the pre-Christian
Slavic pantheon, Perun, performed the role of thunder god, in control of
weather and the sky.
The image of the bear itself is rendered in arrestingly stylized visual
abstractions: the animal transforms itself from a "black eye" set against the
mountain to a "spruce log" in the fields. This abstraction is central to the
primitivism of the work as a whole: Tetmajer's "He" can at one level be read
as an imaginative recreation of the bear cult, which, as Boris Rybakov notes,
was perhaps the first of such proto-totemic phenomena in mid-paleolithic
Europe, a period when the bear was among the main objects of the hunt
as well as an inhabitant of the same kinds of caves in which men lived.26
Furthermore the bear cult, whether or not the first, turned out to be one
24. Leslaw Tatarowski, Ludowosc w literaturze Mlodej Polski (Wroclaw, 1991), 21 1.
25. Tetmajer, Na Skalnym Podhalu, 245.
26. B. A. Rybakov, Iazychestva drevnikh slavian (Moscow, 1994), 108.
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Primitivist Narrative and Design in the Polish Fin de Siecle 401
of the most enduring and widespread of its kind throughout the forested
regions of the Eurasian landmass, widely attested among the various indigenous
hunter-gatherer peoples of Siberia at the turn of the century
Ludwik Krzywicki, drawing for the most part on English-language sources
(accounts of fieldwork in North America, Australia, and Melanesia) prefaced
his 1893 essay on the role of animals in the formation of the "primitive
mentality" with the following remarks emphasizing the relevance of
such far-flung examples to local traditional culture: "and that the various
zootheistic views of our people are in fact dispersed and fading links of an
ancient cosmic philosophy, we can easily convince ourselves by taking in
hand any factual material concerning the customs of the lowest-standing
tribes of present-day humanity."28 The same Tylorian assumption underlies
Tetmajer's "He" in its rendering of the bear's consciousness, which is
in fact the projected animism of the hunters in the far distance. The bear's
memory seems almost to reach back to include that of past generations:
"The sweet memory of disasters he had inflicted, of victory, of slaughter,
filled his wanderings. His kingdom, passed down to him from time immemorial
from his ancestors, was again his exclusive domain."29
The presence of the herdsmen, once peripheral, intensifies as the tale
moves toward its climax. The change of season leads to winter, and with it
to the bear's sleep; the narrator briefly shifts perspective to comment on
the local peasantry and list the weapons they gather:
"He" slept under a windfallen tree somewhere in the Hliiiska Valley;
meanwhile the people held council about "him." They would be sorry
not to return to the grassy-leaved dark-spruce clearing, and a desire for
bloody revenge rankled their hearts. And when spring set in, about a
dozen men, well armed with bows, knives, and axes, with shovels in hand
and iron traps fitted with thick chains, set off into the mountains by a
path cut in the rocks.30
Here, as elsewhere, the herdsmen remain an undifferentiated collectivity,
whereas the repeated use of the pronoun in quotation marks to refer to
the bear suggests how he has become a subject of legend among them.
Equally important is Tetmajer's ethnographicized technique: terse, affectless,
yet careful to enumerate at length the material objects of the mountain
people's daily life. In this context, the device of the catalogue implicitly
tends to animate the objects that surround the highlander. Further
on, for example, the list of musical instruments the herdsmen carry with
them suggestively renders the quality of each instrument's tone through
27. See, for example,James Frazer's discussion of bear sacrifice among the Ainu of Sakhalin
and the Gilyak of the Amur River valley: The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
(New York, 1922), 585- 600. E. A. Alekseenko cites prerevolutionary Russian accounts
of the bear cult among the Ket (vicinity of the Enisei River): "Kul't medvedia u Ketov," in
A. K. Baiburin, N. M. Girenko, and K. V Chistov, eds., Kunstkamera (Muzei antropologii i etnografli
im. Petra Velikogo): Izbrannye stat'i (St. Petersburg, 1995), 60- 62.
28. Ludwik Krzywicki, "Rola zwierz:4t w pojqciu pierwotnej umyslosci," Wisla, 1893,
no. 7:246.
29. Tetmajer, Na Skalnym Podhalu, 245.
30. Ibid., 246.
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402 Slavic Review
alliteration. "And they went forth with clamor, song, and music, filling the
mountains with the strains of the fiddle, the bleating bellow of the bagpipe,
the far-running whistle of the reed pipe, and the wide wail of the
alpenhorn."''3 "He" thus turns out to be not merely the study of an animal,
but also a record of the traces his pursuers have left in the mountain landscape,
the products of their crafts and labor (weapons, musical instruments,
paths hewn along rocky slopes) as well as traditional custom. Caught
by one of the traps mentioned above and eventually felled after lengthy
pursuit and struggle, the bear is transformed: from the subject of popular
legend he becomes an object of material culture. Tetmajer abruptly ends
the story with the image of the bear's skin bolted down and stretched out
in the sun to dry.
An earlier work in the Podhale cycle anticipates the animistic perspective
of "He." Entitled "DzikiJuhas" (The savage shepherd), the story follows
a similar narrative trajectory: the shepherd, a solitary figure of legendary
strength and brutality (once, in a fit of rage, he throws a flock of
sheep down a precipice) dies a violent death in the forest. Yet, whereas
"He" focuses on the image of an anthropomorphized animal, "The Savage
Shepherd" presents a human figure whose alienation from society takes
the form of deranged wildness. Rejected by a maiden, the shepherd considers
crushing her mountain abode with a boulder; lacking the will to do
so, he rushes to the forest and there begins to hurl himself at the trees,
eventually uprooting several spruces before collapsing, exhausted and
covered in blood. The resulting din carries far enough that huntsmen
elsewhere in the valley assume a bear has been caught in a trap. They
arrive to find a welter of destruction: a jagged clearing where once there
had been a thick growth of spruce trees, and under one of their trunks the
dying shepherd. Each voices conjectures to explain the scene before
them. Finally one of the huntsmen recognizes the dying man as the "savage"
shepherd fromJurgow, and recounts an anecdote about his strength:
once the shepherd had managed to stop a mill wheel with his own bare
hands, forcing the terrified miller to give up two twenty-crown pieces (dwa
cwancygiery; cwancygier, an Austro-Hungarian coin, is a Polonization of the
German zwanzig [twenty]). At this point one of the other huntsmen notices
the shepherd stirring; the shepherd's final words describe what overcame
him: "a wench and the forest" (dziewka i las).32
Tetmajer's Podhale tales often demonstrate what Walter Benjamin,
in an essay on the nature of storytelling, termed "that chaste compactne
which precludes psychological analysis."33 While the narrative technique
of "The Savage Shepherd" is similarly laconic, the story's implications become
clearer when set against the contexts of ethnology and nationalism.
With these in mind we can engage the work's two major enigmas: the
shepherd's relation to nature, specifically the cause of his madness in the
forest, and the historical situation in which the tale unfolds.
The shepherd's "wildness" grows out of an intense identification with
31. Ibid., 247.
32. Ibid., 123.
33. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,"
Illuminations (New York, 1968), 91.
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Primitivist Narrative and Design in the Polish Fin de Siecle 403
nature in a way that dramatizes Tylorian assumptions about the survival
of animist belief. The shepherd is savage (dziki) precisely because he
preserves traces of a primitive state, here rendered as a heroic, if selfdestructive,
pathology. The description of the old forest, leading up to the
crucial moment when the unhinged shepherd calls out to it, recalls Krzywicki's
remarks cited earlier about the vestigial "ancient cosmic philosophy"
underlying the outlook of Polish peasantry at the turn of the century:
There the spruces were stout like the pillars in a wooden church, their
boughs entwined so thickly the sky was barely visible ... everywhere green
moss, moss heavy with moisture, olive-green and hanging from boughs,
[moss] as long as beards.... And between the trees tall yellow flowers
grew that shone brightly through the branches, in such a way that you
would have said something evil was looking at you, till you shuddered.
And so quiet was it that there was no wind, not a sound. Not even the ripple
of water in the stream from below. A forest as silent as a dead man.34
Tetmajer vividly evokes the landscape of the shepherd's hysteria, a synesthetic
vision of an anthropomorphized nature: the beardlike growths of
moss, the sinister gaze of yellow blossoms, and most of all the heavy silence
of the forest as a whole. Moreover, the reference to sacred architecture
carries with it the suggestion of the cultic significance of the spruce in preChristian
belief. Recent studies on pagan Slavic myth and ritual have cited
seventeenth-century missionary accounts of offerings made to a giant
spruce in the vicinity of Zakopane, with supplicants circling the tree on
their knees as a sign of veneration.35 The challenge the shepherd issues
to the forest ("Hey forest! Forest! Either you or me!" [Hej lesie! lesie!Aboja,
abo ty!] 36) and the subsequent self-destructive frenzy in which he attempts
to fell the spruces both dramatize the notion of the forest as a sentient, if
not sacred, being. Significantly, the spruce cult is considered to be of nonSlavic
origin, a borrowing from Romanian pastoralists who migrated northward
through the Carpathians between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries,37
and thus another example of the diverse multiethnic influences
at work in the culture of the Tatra highlands.
Whether or not Tetmajer was aware of the significance of the spruce
tree, the point leads us back to the historicity of the Podhale tales. As
we saw earlier, Tetmajer's project claims to represent an already vanishing
regional tradition by reaching back into an indefinite, mythicized past. At
the same time, traces of a recent and specific past appear in the margins
of such stories as "The Savage Shepherd." Seemingly incidental motifs,
such as the two twenty-crown pieces (cwancygiery) mentioned at the tale's
end, form part of a larger web of reference to institutions of imperial
power. Especially noteworthy in this respect is the issue of military recruitment.
The young woman who becomes the object of the shepherd's attention
turns him away, she explains, because she is already betrothed to a
34. Tetmajer, Na Skalnym Podhalu, 121.
35. Teresa Karwicka, "The Possibilities of Reconstruction of the Beliefs of Ancient
Slavs on the Basis of Ethnographic Data," Ethnologia Polona 12 (1986): 146. See also K. Dobrowolski,
"Studia nad teori:4 kultury ludowej," Ethnografia Polska 4 (1961): 15-92.
36. Tetmajer, Na Skalnym Podhalu, 122.
37. Karwicka, "The Possibilities of Reconstruction," 146.
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404 Slavic Review
herdsmen presently off serving in the cuirassiers (co przy kilysyerak sluzy) .38
Then, when the shepherd, in fury over his rejection, takes to the forest,
the local highlanders at first account for his absence by assuming he had
enlisted ("for indeed imperial cavalry had traveled to Lewocza for the
purpose of recruitment" [bo wlasnie przyjechali do Lewoezy rajtarzy cesarse
werbunkiem] ) .9 Most suggestively of all, the story opens with a description
of the damage the shepherd had inflicted on his cell when he was once
held in the local jail,40 although the reason for his imprisonment is never
specified. Tetmajer does not, however, flesh out any overtly nationalist allegory
here or elsewhere in the Podhale cycle. He departs from the highlander
vogue of his time (goralszczyzna i zakopian'szczyzna) in his focus on
the autonomy and specificity of regional culture per se rather than as a
symbolic repository of national myth.
Yet the primitivist aesthetic that inheres in such works as "The Savage
Shepherd" and "He" articulates a pervasive fin-de-siecle anxiety over untraceable
origins and unbridgeable distances. In this respect Tetmajer's
writing exemplifies the remarkable cross-fertilization of literary influen
in this period. Both stories implicitly respond to the primitivist construction
of nature that takes place in Knut Hamsun's widely translated fiction
of the 1890s, particularly in the novel Pan: Af L0jtnant Thomas Glahns papirer
(Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's papers, 1894) .41 The protagonist
of that work writes a memoir-like account of a romantic obsession
that overcame him during a summer spent at the edge of the forest in a
hunter's lodge on the Norwegian coast. His entries relate an alienation
from society that grows in tandem with an intensely lyrical identification
with the northern landscape. Late in the novel, the first signs of the fall's
approach set off the culminating phase of the hero's development, a time
of sleepless nocturnal brooding he refers to as his "iron nights."42 Interspersed
among these night-wanderings are passages that convey an ecstatic
sense of fusion of the self with the surrounding environment: "Listen
in the east and listen in the west, but listen! That is the everlasting God!
This stillness murmuring in my ear is the blood of all nature seething, is
God weaving through the world and through me. I see a gossamer thread
glistening in the fire's light, I hear the rowing of a boat in the harbor, the
Northern lights rise against the northern sky."43 Hamsun's Nietzschean
hunter and Tetmajer's "savage" characters (the bear and his pursuers as
well as the shepherd) have in common an experience of nature that imag-
38. Tetmajer, Na Skalnym Podhalu, 120.
39. Ibid., 121.
40. Ibid., 117.
41. Pan first appeared in Polish on the pages of the journal Czas (Time) in 1900. It
was published in book form in 1902 and republished frequently thereafter (in 1903, 1911,
and 1912 in the prewar period alone). See Marian Lewko, "Zgruchotana wielkosc: Wok6o
teatru Knuta Hamsuna," Roczniki Humanistyczne 29, no. 5 (1981): 5-9.
42. Knut Hamsun, Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's papers, trans. James W. McFarlane
(London, 1955), 121.
43. Ibid., 123. And slightly further on, the following passage: "Again some minutes
pass. I turn my head, the strangely heavy air ebbs away and I see something like the back
of a spirit who wanders soundlessly through the forest" (128).
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Primitivist Narrative and Design in the Polish Fin de Siecle 405
inatively represents the perspective of animist belief. They also inhabit, at
least for a time, a landscape of pristine isolation from the modern social
order. The foregoing affinities should not obscure a crucial difference
between the two writers, however. Whereas the violent end of Hamsun's
hero signals the death of the individual, the respective fates of Tetmajer's
highlanders (in the stories we have seen as well as elsewhere in the Podhale
cycle) signify the dying-out of an entire culture.
The 1914 edition of In Stony Podhale ends with an essay devoted to the
memory of Szymek Krzys (his actual name was Szymon Gatsienica), an itinerant
storyteller and friend of Tetmajer's who died in 1907. A shepherd
who had for some while worked in a factory in Budapest, one of the imperial
capitals, Krzys remained, according to Tetmajer, the least acculturated
of all his native informants despite his exposure to the world beyond
the Tatras. Tetmajer especially valued him as a rare repository of local pagan
beliefs:
Neither the religion he was taught, nor any document of civilization he
saw in Zakopane even slightly weakened in him that most primitive belief;
for him goblins really lived somewhere in the scree above the Bielsky
Caves ... animals had intuition and sight. . . Krzys was the unwitting
poet of dead chivalry and dying heathenism in Podhale and as such was
its unrewarded and invaluable treasure.44
Completely absent here is Eljasz-Radzikowski's notion of Podhale as a "microcosm
of the ancient Polish people." In Stony Podhale, does not, on the
whole, anticipate 1918 (the inception of an independent Poland). Rather,
Tetmajer's work conceives of ethnic identity in exclusively regional terms
that tend increasingly toward the past tense. The tales, and particularly
the essays that frame them, record a process that Walter Benjamin would
a few decades later describe as the dying-out of storytelling, a symptom of
the decline of craftsmanship in an era of industrialization: "The role of the
hand in production has become more modest, and the place it filled in
storytelling lies waste."45 Tetmajer's project, like Matlakowski's encyclopedic
description of local woodworking technique and design, is a peculiarly
fin-de-siecle attempt to appropriate the elements of what was perceived as
a disappearing vernacular tradition.
44. Tetmajer, Na Skalnym Podhalu, 441.
45. Benjamin, "The Storyteller," 87.
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