52 NARODculture and Orthodox religion. The cultural revival was promoted in the first
instance by the Catholic clergy, especially by successive Bishops of Samogitia,
Joseph GiedroyC (1745—1838) and Matthias Valancius (1801-75). The publica-
tion in 1841 in Polish, of a multi-volume 'History of Lithuania' by Teodor
Narbutt (1784-1864), and later translations into Lithuanian of works by that
famous Lithuanian poet, 'Adomas Mickievicius', set the pace for native literary
talent. Important cultural advances were provoked by the emancipation of the
peasantry in 1861, and by the establishment of a Lithuanian orthography which,
to spite the Poles, was based on the Czech alphabet. In the late nineteenth
century, the Lithuanian national movement assumed an overtly political
character, with its own loyalist, conciliatory, and revolutionary trends, its own
parties, and its own emigre fund-raisers. As a result, the scope for Polish-
oriented politics was confined to the Polish-speaking sector of the population,
in particular to important segments of the land-owning class and of the urban
bourgeoisie in Wilno, Grodno, Nowogrodek, and elsewhere. The social and
cultural situation was far more complex than either Polish or Lithuanian
nationalists were willing to admit. Ethnographers who tried to investigate the
area in a scientific manner encountered many baffling contradictions. An oral
researcher, interviewing the local shoemaker in a village near Kaunas (Kowno)
in 1885, recorded a most revealing conversation:
- What tribe do you belong to?
-I am a Catholic. - That's not what I mean. I'm asking you whether you are a Pole or a Lithuanian.
- I am a Pole, and a Lithuanian as well.
- That is impossible. You have to be either one or the other.
- I speak Polish, the shoemaker said, and I also speak Lithuanian. And that was the
end of the interview.^52
The shoemaker was better informed than the ethnographer. Many of the men
who emerged as the leaders of the Lithuanian independence movement, and
who in the course of the First World War, under German protection, formed the
government of the Taryba or 'State Council' had intimate links with the Poles.
For this very reason, they were especially mindful to conceal them. It is by no
means exceptional that the first elected President of the Polish Republic, Gabriel
Narutowicz (1865-1922) was the natural brother of a member of the Taryba
and of the first government of the Lithuanian Republic, Stanislavas
Narutavicius (1862-1932). In 1918, at the moment of independence, the popu-
lation of Lithuania numbered some 3 million, of whom about 10 per cent were
Poles."
The Byelorussians were at odds not only with the Poles but also with the
Russians, the Lithuanians, and the Ukrainians. Descendants of the Orthodox or
Uniate Slavonic peasantry of central Lithuania, or 'White Ruthenia', they
belonged to the least developed branch of the East Slavs. Their national move-
ment, which in the disparaging words of Lewis Namier 'could have been seated
on one small sofa', spent all its meagre resources proving to the world that it had