THE GROWTH OF THE MODERN NATION 19points of differentiation varying from Hydrography and Pedology to
Epidemiology, Nutrition, Folklore, and the status of women. On this basis, he
argued that the origins of the Great Russians lay not with the Indo-European
Slavs but rather with the Finnic and Hunnic peoples of Asia. The connection
between the Slavonic—Christian state of Kiev Rus and the later Grand Duchy of
Moscow and its successor, the Empire of all the Russias, was, in his view, a
political fabrication. The ancestral home of the Slavs lay between the Vistula
and the Dnieper, and in its eastern reaches contained the lands of the Poles and
the Ruthenes, but not of the Muscovites. In short, the Poles are not related to the
Russians in any natural way. Duchinski's ideas have inspired numerous contin-
uators, not least the Ukrainian historian, Hrushevsky. Yet, in the words of his
Russian critics, whose views have since gained a virtual monopoly in the world
at large, they were nothing more than 'an ancient Polish song'.^19 In the popular
mind, Polish racial concepts assumed much cruder form. Under pressure from
German racialists on the one hand and from Pan-slav racialists on the other,
Poles were driven to invent fantasies of their own ethnic exclusiveness, and to
reject all thoughts of kinship with other peoples of the area. In view of the ban
on intermarriage recommended by Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis alike, they
were tempted to swell the rising tide of anti-Semitism, and of Jewish anti-
Polonism. In this way, a fundamental rift began to appear in the ranks of Polish
Nationalism. Henceforth, one branch of opinion began to imagine the nation to
be a distinct ethnic group, biologically unique. The other branch held to the
older view whereby the nation was seen to be made up of all those individuals
who shared the same political, social, and cultural traditions. The former opin-
ion, which believes that Poles are born, not created, has always been able to find
common language with sympathetic elements in Russia. The latter which holds
that anyone is a Pole who feels himself to be one, has invariably found support
among the intelligentsia, where people of variegated origins frequently inter-
mixed. Strangely enough, the most devoted disciples of Polish nationalism often
came from families of mixed origin. Lelewel, whose family was of German ori-
gin, and Chopin, who was half French, are obvious examples of men whose
sense of Polish identity was reinforced by the need to compensate for their
genealogy. Assimilated Jews, in particular, were noted for their tendency to
become more Polish than the Poles.
National pride was generated no less from achievements which had no imme-
diate connection with nationality. Great efforts were made to prove and exag-
gerate the 'Polishness' of men and women whose achievements were thought to
bolster the self-esteem of the emergent nation. The two primary candidates for
this treatment in the scientific field were Marie Curie-Sklodowska and Nicholas
Copernicus: in the literary field, the English writer of Polish extraction, Joseph
Conrad, and in music, Frederyk Chopin. In 1873, for example, immense resent-
ment was aroused by preparations in Germany to celebrate the fourth centenary
of the great German scientist 'Nikolaus Koppernik', for the Poles were them-
selves preparing to honour the great Polish scientist 'Mikolaj Kopernik'.