God’s Playground. A History of Poland, Vol. 2. 1795 to the Present

6 NAROD

During the five or six generations when it had no concrete existence, 'Poland',

as an abstraction, could be remembered from the past, or aspired to for the

future, but only imagined in the present. It had not merely been broken into

three parts; it had been vaporized, transposed into thin air, fragmented into mil-

lions of invisible particles. There were as many different Polands as there were

people who cared to perceive it, as many 'kings of Poland' as cared to reign in

Diagram A. The Successor States of Poland-Lithuania, (1772-1945)