- KULTURA
circles, which met in Minsk and Kiev no less than in Warsaw, Poznari, or
Cracow. They drank deeply of all modern literature — Buckle, Spencer, Taine,
J. S. Mill, Darwin, Lassalle, even Marx; and, without wishing to admit it, they
were deeply influenced by the prophets of German nationalism - Fichte, Herder,
Nietzsche - whose success they both admired and resented. They would have
liked D'Azeglio's epigram of i860: 'Now that we have made Italy we must make
Italians'; although Poland, unlike Italy, did not yet exist.
It is not hard to show that the view of the nation as conceived by these mis-
sionaries was highly fanciful. The very fact that they had to battle against the
entrenched attitudes of people whom they themselves regarded as 'Poles' is
proof enough. On this score, one of their apostles Waclaw Nalkowski
(1851-1911) made a clear distinction between the nerwowiec or mozgowiec,
(the 'worrying and thinking man') and the inert mass of the nation as a whole.
He divided the latter into three types. The ludzie-drewna (Tree-people) were
impervious to patriotic feelings, and lived mechanical, unthinking lives. The
ludzie-byki (Ox-people) were capable of patriotic feelings, but having
insufficient intelligence were unable to break away from the herd. The ludzie-
swinie (Swine-people), although highly intelligent, sought only 'to roll in the
mud' - (rolling in the 'mud' for the patriot being a metaphor for dabbling in cul-
tures other than Polish). He even identified certain transitional types such as
'crypto-swine', 'ox-like swine', and 'tree-like swine'. The starting-point for all
such convolutions was the assumption that the 'nation', as conceived by the
missionaries, was the one and only Good. In this light, the cause of Polish cul-
ture was both idealistic and elitist.^8
Even so, their achievements were enormous. In thirty years of ceaseless activ-
ity, the cultural patriots not only neutralized the efforts of the Germanizers and
Russifiers; they actually began to overtake them. By the turn of the century, the
state system of education in Prussian and Russian Poland was floundering amidst
a tidal wave of private, informal or'underground' Polish cultural enterprises.
Most famous perhaps was the Flying University, founded in Warsaw in
1882—3 by Jadwiga Szczawinska (1863-1910). Meeting every week in different
locations to avoid detection, the groups attracted the support of radical profes-
sors, such as Wladyslaw Smoleriski, Adam Mahrburg (1855-1913), or Ludwig
Krzywicki (1859—1941), and Jan Wladystaw David (1859-1914), the philoso-
pher, Szczawinska's husband. In time, four separate faculties were organized,
and diplomas were issued at the end of courses as rigorous as anything offered
in the public sector. Maria Sklodowska-Curie was but the best-known of the
graduates. After 1906, when the Flying University was legalized, it took the
name of the 'Society for Scientific Courses', and in 1919 the 'Free Polish
University'. It still had its imitators later in the century.^9
Sympathetic benefactors sought to bypass the state system by founding pri-
vate schools. In 1897 the Higher Technical School opened its doors in Warsaw,
on the initiative of two local industrialists, Hipolyt Hawelburg and S. Rotwand,
and three years later, the Warsaw Polytechnic. In the absence of a Polish