The Poles in SiberiaDzieje Polaków na Syberji by Michał JanikReview by: Monica M. GardnerThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 7, No. 21 (Mar., 1929), pp. 752-755Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4202349 .

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752 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.

canisms. Other minor errata are " Scescen " for " Szecsen " (290), " Count" for " Baron " Jelaci6 (25), " King " for " Prince " Milan on his accession (390). The phrase " To speak Magyar and understand Hungarian" (p. 405) makes nonsense.

An even graver blemish from the point of view of any serious student, and incidentally a proof that the matter was taken out of the author's hands, is the elimination of all notes and references and the absence of any bibliography. The reader is thus deprived of any cllue -to Professor Redlich's new sources, except thanks to some accidental passing allusion to Baron Kempen's diaries, to the confidential reports of Baron Augus or to the diplomatic correspondence of Kalnoky and others. Until this omission is repaired, scholars will do well to use -the German, not the English, edition.

R. W. SETON-WATSON.

THE POLES IN SIBERIA.

Dzieje Polakow na Syberji. By Michat Janik. Pp. viii + 472. Cracow, I928.

IF the student of history is tempted to linger upon the heroes and the battlefields that have won a nation her liberty or her fame, we may well study the story of Poland's struggle for her freedom in the penal settle- ments of Siberia. For Poland's battlefield was no less there than in the forests where the insurgents of I863 found a soldier's grave, or on the bloodstained ramparts of Warsaw that saw the closing scenes of the conffict of I830. Siberia was used by Russia as a penal colony as early as the 17th century. It was there that she sent her Polish prisoners of war during the years of Poland's independence; and in proportion as the course of history brought about the tragedy of Poland, Siberia became the almost certain destination of the Polish patriot martyrs. More especially between the Rising of I830 and the years immediately following that of I863 the stream of exiles banished to Siberia reached an enormous figure. Men, women, and even children, numbered among the scum of Russia's outcasts, went thither as felons in the company of Russian murderers and thieves. So large a part did this exile to Siberia come to play in Polish nationalism that Siberia has been ,called a second Poland, and the word Sybirak has become a term of honour in the Polish language.

It is therefore fitting that in the tenth year of Poland's recovered -independence a record of the Polish martyrology of Siberia should have been published in the shape of a monograph by Dr. Michal Janik, entitled History of the Poles in Siberia. The book opens with a brief -general description of Siberia. The author subsequently follows the footsteps of his compatriots in Siberia, beginning with the rare journeys of Polish travellers in the 13th century and ending with the outbreak of the Great War. When we state that Dr. Janik includes in his story ;records of Polish exiles in certain other districts of Asiatic and European

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REVIEWS. 753

Russia besides Siberia, and that he gives some account of the causes that sent the subjects of his book to their doom, such as their work in the secret patriotic societies and participation in Poland's repeated attempts at insurrection, it will be seen that he covers a wide field. Several of these exiles have left recollections of their experiences which, published many years ago, have with the lapse of time become inacces- sible to the general public, or else still lie in manuscript. Of these Dr. Janik has made good use. He has produced a book that is not only of considerable historical value, but that is at the same time rich in drama and pathos, and full of curious information. His subject may justly be considered as the most tragic one in the history of Poland's martyrdom. But its dark colours are relieved by the heroism with which these exiled sons of Poland not only accepted the most dreaded of fates, but after they had regained their liberty fearlessly resumed the work for their country that had sent them in the first instance to Siberia, and that sent them there again.

Dr. Janik takes the reader through all the stages of the Siberian exile's life. The journey thither as a convict seems to have been the most abhorred part of the penalty, if only on account of the unspeakable conditions of the night quarters on the road and the frequent brutality of the officer in command of the convoy. We hear pathetic stories of the Polish prisoners as they crossed the frontiers of their country for the last time gathering a handful of Polish soil to lie in their coffins. The severity of the ultimate lot of the exile differed, ranging from forced labour in the mines or the poisonous ore foundries, detested service in the Siberian regiment as private soldiers, and lighter work in the public offices to that of mere penal settlement. The Polish penal settler had to support himself by taking up some trade, on which point Dr. Janik gives many curious details. Those of blacksmiths and shoemakers were a usual means of livelihood. We hear of tobacco-planting; and an exiled monk made sweets of such excellence as to be eagerly sought after even by distant Siberian towns. Siberian orchestras were com- posed of Poles, and Poles opened the first restaurants and hotels known in Siberia. Not infrequently Poles acted as tutors to the children of local Russian officials. The Polish exiles were on a far higher cultural level than the provincial Russian inhabitants of the country; and it is an acknowledged fact that this wholesale and com- pulsory Polish deportation had a beneficent moral and mental influence on that remote and benighted outpost of Russia. Some of the Polish exiles, it is true, went down under adversity, fell victims to the pre- vailing drunkenness of the population of Siberia, or in rare instances committed suicide. Cases of treachery and of national apostasy were likewise not unknown. But these were the exceptions: for it should be remembered that the Polish exiles were for the most part the noblest of the nation, who were only in Siberia by reason of their self-sacrificing devotion to a great cause. It is to their credit that these men who, however their sentence varied, all suffered alike from what was the

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754 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.

chief torment of their exile-namely, the terrible monotony of their lives, and still more the unappeasable yearning for their country-did not allow the powers of their mind or any talent that they possessed to die out for lack of use. Some, indeed, under the stress of circumstance developed new abilities with which to earn a living or to keep grief at bay. They made scientific studies of Siberian geography, ethnography and geology, sometimes of such value as to win recognition from the Russian Government. They improved local agriculture and intro- duced new branches of commerce. Both Polish art and literature have been enriched by the work of Poland's Siberian exiles. In addition, the exiles made every effort to lead a national community life. They instituted their own savings banks and lending libraries, with the help of funds and books received from Poland. They organised lectures and classes. They kept up their patriotic traditions, and we find special records of the time-honoured Christmas-eve feast-perhaps the saddest moment of the exile's life-being scrupulously observed to the accom- paniment of the Polish hymns in wretched Siberian huts. Men like Piotr Moszyfiski, known by his fellow-exiles as " St. Peter," and the priest Szwernicki, who laboured as an apostle among his compatriots, devoted their sad lives to alleviating the lot of their companions in misery.

Attempts at escape from Siberia were not unknown. They were generally unsuccessful. That of Piotrowski, whose story of his flight was made accessible to the Western world by Klaczko's French trans- lation, was a rare exception. Others, like that of Migurski and his wife, who, by dint of extraordinary ingenuity, succeeded in reaching as far as Moscow and there experienced the bitterness of betrayal by their Cossack driver, were far more common. Projects of collective armed uprisings were even more certainly doomed to failure, and to a sanguinary sequel of executions, notorious even in the tragic history of Polish Siberia. The condition of the exiles, both on the journey to Siberia and in the country itself, was largely dependent on the indi- vidual temper of the officer in charge of the convoy and that of the- local commander where the convoy halted or where the exile was finally stationed. Amidst many examples of cruelty and brutal repression on the part of these men we come across pleasing instances of Russian commanders doing all in their power to treat the Polish exiles, not as criminals, but as patriots meriting every mitigation in their lot. The humanity with which Muraviev Amurski, the brother of the "Hangman," dealt with the Polish exiles is often mentioned. Russian ladies frequently showered kindness upon the Poles. The Russian peasants, as the exiles passed through on the way to Siberia, always treated them with sympathy, bestowing upon them the name of " The Unfortunates"; and the relations of the Poles with the Russian Decembrists serving their sentence in Siberia and heard more of the condition of the children born of these Siberian marriages. Many women were exiled on their own account to Siberia, of whom perhaps the

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REVIEWS. 755

best known is Eva Felin'ska, whose account of her life in Siberia has been translated into English, and whose son, the famous Archbishop of Warsaw, later followed the same road of patriotism and penal banishment. We find an appalling case of a girl of sixteen, driven to Siberia on foot in a gang of ordinary criminals for having sent Mickiewicz's poems to her brother. While such familiar figures in the pages of Poland's martyrology as Roman Sanguszko, Sierakowski, Gieysztor, and others no less well known, play a large part in Dr. Janik's pages, he has also rescued obscure names and deeds of devotion from the oblivion into which they would otherwise have inevitably sunk. We may observe that critics who object to the long arm of coincidence in plays and novels will find in these Siberian annals facts stranger than fiction. The book has a map and several illustrations, consisting of portraits and Siberian pictures, two of the latter being reproductions of the works of Sochaczewski, himself a Siberian exile, and is provided with a not altogether satisfactory index.

MONICA M. GARDNER.

THE BOLSHEVIKS AND THE CLASSICS. THE official attitude of the Soviet Government to classical pre-Revolu- tion literature is one of the strange paradoxes of present-day Russian life. According to Marxian standards, everything that is bourgeois is damnable, and yet this axiom can be applied only with certain reserva- tions to the literature written by the " bourgeois " and the " aristo- crats " of the old Russian Empire. A striking example of this " Marxian approach " to the great writers of the past was offered by the numerous official documents published in connection with the recent Tolstoy centenary-for instance, the centenary number of the weekly Bulletin issued by the Gosizdat, the official publishing concern of the USSR, and consequently the largest and most powerful " pub- lisher" in the country. The object of this issue of the Bulletin is to specify to. what extent a good and true Bolshevik is permitted to admire Tolstoy, and in what way Tolstoy's ideas go conxrary to good Com- munist ideology. The Bulletin contains three articles characteristically entitled: Tolstoy and the Present Age, Tolstoy and the Proletarian Reader, and-needless to add-Lenin and Tolstoy. The first is the most outspoken. One learns from it that Tolstoy was a great crafts- man. But here the praise stops and the rest is a long series of buts. The buts include the following; His ideology was putrid; at bottom he was as narrow-minded an aristocrat as Vronsky, the brainless lover of Anna Karenina; his doctrine was a farce resolving itself into " I'm a wicked, nasty man, but I am trying hard to perfect myself morally, and instead of meat, I eat rice cutlets ; and in spite of his sound criticism of certain social evils of his time, "he carried on a propaganda in favour of one of the filthiest things in the world-namely. religion."

Lenin's opinion of Tolstoy is, of course, approached with the usual

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