PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION
OF VOLUME 1
To write the history of someone else's country is, no doubt, to take a terrible
liberty. Judging by the reticence which professional scholars show before pro-
nouncing on minor episodes in the past of their own country, it would seem that
only the young and foolhardy might attempt to publish their thoughts on other
people's millennia. A proper appreciation of the complexities of the task deters
most of those best qualified to perform it. An Englishman who has dared to
write a History of Poland, therefore, must be aware that any number of Polish
scholars know vastly more about the subject than he does. At the same time, free
from the burdens of their knowledge and from political circumstances which
inhibit the expression of independent views, he can still hope to contribute
perspectives and insights of value. Fortitude, no less than Modesty, must be his
constant companions.
This study is not inspired by any particular ideology. It cannot claim to be
objective, of course, since objectivity is always impossible. Like all history
books, it had to be written through the distorting medium of the mind of the
historian, whose private quirks necessarily select a finite quantity of informa-
tion from the infinite details of past reality. It can faithfully reproduce that
reality no more than a two-dimensional photograph, formed through the
refracting glass of the camera's lens, can produce an accurate picture of the
three-dimensional world. The historian, like the camera, always lies. He is
incapable of telling the whole truth. All he can do is to recognize the particu-
lar distortions to which his work is inevitably subject, and to avoid the grosser
forms of retouching and excision. Like the photographer who demonstrates
the effect on his picture of all the available light filters, he can present the var-
ious interpretations of controversial issues with equal prominence, and refrain
from arbitrary judgements. By so doing, he can hope if not to be objective,
then at least to be impartial.
In this regard, a note on the historian's private philosophy of history may not
be entirely irrelevant. Two formative influences have tended to pull me in oppo-
site directions. A period of study at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow,
where the requirements for the doctoral examinations included reading matter
of a distinctly ideological nature, certainly aroused my curiosity about the prob-
lem of Causality. Whilst not converting me to the cogency of Marxism,
Leninism, or Marxism-Leninism, it did reinforce my earlier suspicions that
something akin to 'historical forces' might exist, and might be responsible in
part for the way that things happen. Concurrently, an earlier period of study in