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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
It has to be possible to kind of accept where you're from and to appreciate it and to love it in a way that doesn't become violent.
Noah Feldman:Even in an openly nationalist framework, she's trying to develop a version of national identity that is still compatible with treating people equally. Welcome to a special episode of the University of Minnesota Press podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about an extraordinary new book, edited and translated by Professor Marta Figlerowicz of Yale University, The A Maria Yagnon Reader. I'm Noah Feldman. I teach at Harvard University.
Noah Feldman:And it's my huge pleasure to have the opportunity to be here with Marta to talk about a very important book that she compiled, analyzed, edited, and translated from the original Polish. Marta, it's great to be with you.
Marta Figlerowicz:Lovely to be with you, Noah.
Noah Feldman:Marta, a lot of people, and I include myself in this, who are interested in literature, are interested in Eastern Europe, are interested in, the history of Poland even, may not be sufficiently expert to have heard of this extraordinary woman, Maria Janion, whose work you're really introducing for the first time, I think it's fair to say, to an English speaking audience. So would you begin by just telling us a little bit about her? And then from there, we'll go on to why you chose to do this project.
Marta Figlerowicz:Yes, I would love to do that. So Jan Yun is a legendary figure within Eastern European academia. She's seen very much as the mother of Polish feminism, of Polish leftist literary theory in the twentieth century and also of a lot of the important political thinking that happened around Poland's transition out of communism into capitalism, which culminated arguably in Poland joining the EU. So her life story is deeply enmeshed in all of the complications of twenty first century Poland. She was born in Vilnius, which was then part of Poland, in 1926.
Marta Figlerowicz:She was just a teen when the Second World War broke out and she witnessed indirectly the mass genocide of Jewish people of Vilnius and was partly involved in the underground before being relocated to Central Poland in 1945 as the borders were getting redrawn. So she was the daughter of a single mother and very much somebody who was not being tracked into anything like academia, I mean, let alone academia under the older or authoritarian Polish government, which was very much kind of class based. And it was only because of the change in regime, really, that she was able to scrape up the funding to go to university, and she was noticed by some of the prominent leftist and Marxist literary critics there. And soon enough she was doing a PhD, got an academic position, and she began writing and teaching, both copiously. She's one of those people who could have wrote two dozen novels and hundreds of articles.
Marta Figlerowicz:I didn't quite understand that when I got to the task of translating her, but it soon became apparent. And she also trained a whole generation of young academics who saw her as a conduit into creative, non imitative thinking in the humanities, kind of unashamed and unembarrassed of being in Eastern Europe and of Eastern Europe as a kind of critical subject position.
Noah Feldman:And Marta, you're a scholar of comparative literature and you've written about, as the great scholars of comparative literature do, literature in more language than most human beings know and more than a lot of us have even heard of. And you're from Poland originally. Janjon someone whom you knew about during your upbringing and your early intellectual formation? Was she someone whose work was close to your mind as you ventured into many other literatures? Or was she someone whom you kind of discovered as an adult scholar?
Marta Figlerowicz:So surprisingly, I had to go to The United States, to Weidner specifically, to discover her, Weidner, the library at Harvard.
Noah Feldman:Which I will just say for the audience, if you have a fantasy of a library that has everything in it, like a Borje story, Widener Library is that library and it has open stacks. So now we just have everything in it. If you wander long enough, you will find everything you need in human life in the Widener Library. It's my favorite place on Earth. So this is a great story.
Noah Feldman:I'm happy this is a Widener story. So go
Marta Figlerowicz:No, no. And also many things that you didn't actually need. But turned out Yanyon was something I needed. And you have to picture me in what was then kind of level three where there's automatic lighting that turns on immediately above you, but then turns off as soon as you exit like in a square inch. So very atmospheric.
Marta Figlerowicz:So I was raised in a very conservative part of Poland by a scientific couple. I didn't actually realize that the kind of work she did was available in Poland. And I was also coming from a region from Western Poland, a region which was always much more fascinated with the West even than Eastern Poland. My eyes were very much on the Polish dissidents like Miros, like Kowakowski, the people who broke with communism and left. And this is, I think, part of why I never heard of Janyon, because she was the leftist who stayed in the party until it kicked her out for being too radical and siding with the students.
Marta Figlerowicz:But I have remained haunted by that absence. I found out about her just a bit too late to actually meet her. And now I've become friends with her executor and the kind of later generation of people she's inspired. But she remains this mythical presence of my alternative academic life.
Noah Feldman:And in the alternative academic life, you stay in Poland and you still become a professor of comparative literature, but you do it in Poland. Is that the alternative?
Marta Figlerowicz:Yeah. The sad thing is that we know that could not have happened in quite the same way. But it's a life in which I think I feel more comfortable in my skin as a Polish person, as a queer Polish person, with not always zero optimistic political views.
Noah Feldman:So in some way, in reading this book, I kept on thinking that not on every point, but this Maria Lanyon, whom I was hearing about for the first time, is one type of a kind of proto Marta.
Marta Figlerowicz:Yeah.
Noah Feldman:I mean, you have a lot in common with her. Intellectually, she, like you, is polymathic. Like you, she's a huge academic star from the very beginning. Everyone who meets her thinks, Oh my God, this person is so incredible. I should be so intellectually engaged with her.
Noah Feldman:Like you, queer. Like you, certainly left of center. Although what left and right meant in communist Poland is so complicated for me to make heads or tails of that I'm not even sure we should go down that rabbit hole. So in some way, did you feel that you were finding someone who could have been your teacher or someone who could have been an inspiration or someone who could have even been you?
Marta Figlerowicz:I definitely was. So my immediate impetus for translating this actually is that so she actually looks a lot like my grandma who died the same year Janjil died. And they both look very much like Polish peasants. Look, kind of squat, powerful, like can carry the drunken man home or like tie up wheat. But my grandmother who also kind of so in her case, she never got to go to college, but she was very much an autodidact who taught me how to do research, weird as that sounds.
Marta Figlerowicz:She was just kind of very curious about everything. And she'd retired by the time she was raising me and she would take me to libraries and to bookstores and together we would explore topics. She had her own kind of sophisticated, eccentric literary tastes. But she very much taught me the model of the humanities that I came to love, which is the autodidactic, creatively curious and not kind of hyper professionalized fast track to a certain kind of degree model.
Noah Feldman:That's one of the things that I think made this book such an engaging read for me. And it's one of the reasons I would encourage listeners to read it. Because when you hear from the description that this is a reader to introduce to English speaking people the writings of this important Polish intellectual figure. You think initially, at least I thought, worried that it would be so technically dense that it will be hard for me to make sense of it. But the opposite is true.
Noah Feldman:For someone who was technically a kind of an academic for a lot of her career, Janmun actually wrote what we would just call essays. She's extremely readable. If she talks about Foucault, she'll explain in context why Foucault is relevant to this. If she's introducing anyone but the most famous figures from Polish literary history, she'll give you a capsule biography. You can tell she's also writing for a broad audience.
Noah Feldman:She was not just writing for other academics. She was clearly writing for anyone Polish, since she was writing in Polish, who was interested in the life of the mind and interested in ideas. Even though she bemoans over the course of her writings, the gradual collapse of Polish intellectual culture, her writing presumes that there are people who are interested in that. I learned an enormous amount from the book and found it fascinating. Let me ask you, Marta, because you already mentioned that you were from the Western, more conservative part of Poland.
Noah Feldman:So that immediately introduces one of the crucial themes of the reader, which is Poland between West and East and the associated question of what is Central Europe. Tell us, if you will, something relevant to Jan Jung's picture of what it means for Poland to be a place of West and a place of East, and maybe start with the differences between different parts of Poland and then go from there to describing how that's relevant to her vision of what Poland is and could be and was.
Marta Figlerowicz:Absolutely. And I think even starting with the term Central Europe versus Eastern Europe is a good place to begin. When I was growing up in Poland, everybody around me fiercely described us as Central Europe. Thank you very much. And when I got to Harvard, it turned out when people said Central Europe, they usually meant Germany.
Marta Figlerowicz:And Poland was very much Eastern Europe with all that implied. Part of my kind of Janjon esque education has been to embrace the Eastern in Poland the way that she does. So Polish history and Poland's kind of geographical location are both politically, historically fascinating and they're one of the big subjects she writes about. Poland is, culturally speaking, in historical terms, has been enormously influenced by the East, broadly speaking. Both as you might assume kind of Russia Ukraine, but also the Ottoman Empire.
Marta Figlerowicz:Like if you look at old Polish paintings, all of our nobility dressed like the Ottomans and we are the only European nation to fight with the saber as opposed to the sword, because we took that from both fighting and learning from the Ottomans, with whom we were constantly in some kind of conversation. Poland's own indigenous culture, whatever it might have been before it was baptized in the tenth century is mysterious. Very little is known about it. And that is in part because So this is a kind of relatively recent archaeological discovery, which was in part conducted by my father, which is kind of hilarious. So it turns out early Poland became duchy and then a kingdom on the strength of its export of slaves.
Marta Figlerowicz:And the people who founded the kingdom, whom we have on our banknotes as like the first Polish kings, were most likely not ethnically Polish. It seems like they were either Scandinavian or Celts. So there was very little incentive for whoever was living and ruling Poland and bringing writing into Poland in the tenth century to preserve any of the local mythologies. Unlike, say, was the case in Ireland, where the Celts got the writing and then wrote down their myths. So there's a huge kind of historical and cultural gap that very rapidly got filled in with Catholicism and with a huge over identification with being the bulwark of Westernness, the sense that there be dragons over East, but we're still the West.
Noah Feldman:So what you're describing here is something that I was utterly fascinated by in the book. To recap what you just said in just intro facts, because I needed to clarify this myself in the course of reading the book. Read it and then I kept my Wikipedia nearby to make sure that I was actually understanding what was going on historically. So key point that Poland, first of all, becomes Christian extremely late, as late as the tenth century, number one. Number two, when it becomes Christian, the evidence seems to be that it became Catholic right away.
Noah Feldman:And in that sense, it was differentiated from Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which we associate with the Slavic regions to Poland's East and with, by extension, the Byzantine Empire. So if you think of the Christians really coming from two directions into Europe, Catholicism comes from further West and Eastern Orthodoxy comes from Greece, really actually from Anatolia, from what is today Turkey and further to the East. In a way, they're kind of in a colonial race to control the middle of Europe. And although maybe nobody really describes it that way, this is one of the features that comes out in the book. And somehow the Catholics, whether they get first or just a little bit after the Eastern Orthodox to Poland, they get there.
Noah Feldman:And Poland, as we know it in its historical records, is Catholic. And right away, that associates it with Western Europe as opposed to Eastern Europe. And Poland is actually the dividing line in a meaningful way in the sense that every Christian group East Of Poland is Eastern Orthodox in some way or the other, which Ukraine, which we're going to come back to later, being a prime example. So that's the first component. Am I getting that right?
Noah Feldman:I said that like I knew what I was talking about, but really I'm just saying what I learned reading the book.
Marta Figlerowicz:No, no, that is exactly right. Poland uses the Roman alphabet and not Cyrillic, kind of everything East Of Poland is Cyrillic.
Noah Feldman:So in consequence, we think of as Polish culture for the last thousand years is on the one hand Catholic, which makes it identified in a way with Western Europe. But on the other hand, Polish is a Slavic language and Poles identify as Slavs. And that associates it with Eastern Europe because there's almost nobody, maybe nobody, West Of Poland who's Slavic. Exactly. So right away, Poland is a complex hybrid in this regard.
Noah Feldman:Now, Janjon has this kind of theory that's connected to what you were saying about slavery, according to which early Poland can be imagined as a colonized space. Colonized, as you were saying, maybe by Norse invaders. And in any case, as a colonized space, it is also a place where human beings are exported as slaves. And here it's just worth mentioning the etymological relationship, which Janjon mentions, between the word slave and the word Slav.
Marta Figlerowicz:That's right.
Noah Feldman:So say a little more about this and her picture of what the trauma of being conquered was like. And you were just hinting at it at the absence of a pre Christian mythic Slavic past, which I was utterly fascinated to read about. So would you say more about that, please?
Marta Figlerowicz:Yes. Thank you. That was a beautiful summary. So she pictures Polish people as both fiercely nationalistic, especially after the nineteenth century, the rise of nationalism came when Poland had been partitioned as a country among its neighbours. So it was a nation with no country.
Marta Figlerowicz:Nationalism came into Poland in a fiercely militant activist way, but also in a kind of doubly self questioning way. The self questioning came both from the fact that the Polish state had collapsed, right, as nationalisms in Europe were emerging, but also from the way that there was nothing really to go back to except Catholicism. And everything you could go back to felt very partial, extremely fragmentary and difficult either to imagine or to archivally ground in some way. When you couple that with Polish people's historical inferiority complex to the West, because the Polish people want to be like the West to the extent that they identify with the West as a seat of Catholicism, But on the other hand, they also want to claim a separate identity that is a distinctive Polish identity. It gets you, as you're saying, into this like hall of mirrors.
Noah Feldman:And Mianjon actually postulates that there's this trauma of not having a past as it were, that they can access was crucial to the formation of Polish national identity in the period of the creation of nationalism. In that sense, wants to say that it's different to be Polish than it is to be, let's say, Spanish or Celtic or any of the other, or Catalan, or, you know, any of the many, many, many other identities that form as national identities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, because there's this kind of gap or absence there of not knowing. And she even says there was a theory, which I didn't know, that maybe there was no such thing as a pre Christian Slavic mythology.
Marta Figlerowicz:I know, I love it. It's just like, oh, the Polish people, they didn't think about the cosmos.
Noah Feldman:So what's the takeaway of that? What is that traumatic absence supposed to have done for Poles from her perspective? Because it sometimes sounded like she was saying that a lot of problems derived from not having that identity, but she was never very specific about what she thought the problem was, at least not in the passages that I read.
Marta Figlerowicz:No, it's interesting. I think she sees it in a kind of very Freudian way, not so much as a problem, but as a kind of primal condition. So to kind of understand how we can be a happy nation or like how the people around her can understand themselves, they have to acknowledge this primal wound, which still remains for the most part unacknowledged. But then she derives from it a bunch of other interesting accounts, hypotheses about Poland's kind of complicated relationships to its ethnic neighbors and others. So on the one hand, as I've mentioned, there's the fascination with the West and with parroting the West.
Marta Figlerowicz:On the other hand, there's the fascination with the Ottoman Empire and the wish to be great warriors like the Ottomans and the kind of stray theory that Polish people actually derive from the nomadic people of the steppe as Sarmatians, at least the nobility do. Then there's also kind of in the one of the last essays in the volume, she unravels the fascinating history of the entanglement of Polish romantic politics with early Zionism and the kind of fascination with the Jewish people as the people with the history who happened to be living in Poland. And if only they could work together, like together, they could make Poland a great land. And that is clearly in great part also about a sense of historical continuity, a sense of being able to go back to the point of origin of Christianity a lot of European culture. And then there's also the fascination with Ukraine, which she sees through a similar lens, arguing that both Russia and Poland in various ways see Ukraine as the seat of something primal about Slavdom and they claim whether political or cultural ownership of or affiliation with Ukraine in a way that has to do of course with geopolitics and territory and the Black Sea but it also has to do with where the original big Slavic kingdoms had emerged.
Noah Feldman:So you've just mentioned three of what I had in my notes as four of the major topics in this reader. The first is the capital R Romantic period, which was also the period of Janjon's academic expertise, and the birth of Polish national literature and Polish national identity during that period. So we'll go there first. Then I want to talk about Ukraine and Poland's relationship to Ukraine, which I think many people who, even people who follow the region and are following the current war in Ukraine very closely, are not familiar with. Namely the existence of a Polish aristocracy that governed ethnically Ukrainian peasants for several hundred years, and which is very relevant to the birth of Ukrainian nationalism and to the Cossacks.
Noah Feldman:Third, the third theme you mentioned just now is Poland and the Jews in the broadest sense, which is a topic that I'm certainly interested in because three of my four grandparents came from parts of Poland broadly construed and they were all Ashkenazi Jewish. And so I just have a personal interest in that, as do a lot of Jewish Ashkenazim whose grandparents and great grandparents didn't speak at all, for the most part, about what their experiences were like in Poland, which we will come to. And then the last topic, which is a really very, very important topic, which will be the last topic we come to, which you didn't mention about, you mentioned it earlier, is queer identity in Janjon's thought, which is itself completely fascinating because it's bound up in queerness under communism, which is a topic that I find also very, very fascinating. That's a kind of a map of where we should go over the rest of the interview. So let's start with the Romantic period.
Noah Feldman:Here Jan Jung writes a lot about the person whom, even if you have only a passing familiarity with Polish literary history, is probably the only Romantic Polish writer one has heard of. Think that might have counted for me, which is the great poet Adam Mitzkewitz. So start with his role in the creation of a Polish literature and a Polish identity. And then you can tell us about how Janjon sees his role.
Marta Figlerowicz:Yeah. Mitzkevich is very dear to Janjon's heart for many reasons, not least being the fact that they're both from Vilnius. They share a birth date and they are both complicatedly kind of interested in like what the Polish nation looks like from what used to be called the borderlands, the lands of what is currently Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine that used to belong to the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Noah Feldman:And remind everybody the date to the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, which I have to look up every single time I mention it.
Marta Figlerowicz:That's right. It's the early modern period, basically, broadly construed. And then when it falls apart is when Poland gets picked apart by Russia.
Noah Feldman:And in that period, there are people in Poland speaking Polish. There are aristocracy speaking Polish in both Lithuania and in Ukraine. But the presumably significant parts of the peasant population speak Lithuanian and Lithuania and Ukrainian and Ukraine. So in that period, is it's both a language of ordinary Poles and the Polish aristocracy, but it's also an elite language with respect to Lithuania and Ukrainian. It has a literary existence that I think comes quite late to Also Ukrainian and
Marta Figlerowicz:because most of the Polish aristocracy prefer to speak French because that is fancier. So there's a great line in an Olga Tokapczuk novel where one of her characters who's like caught somewhere in the borderlands is trying to find somebody to help her find a way. And she says, does anybody here speak Polish? And the joke is that like she's in Poland, but there's like the man who speaks Yiddish and the Lithuanian peasant and the Francophone, like elite servant she's brought and there's nobody else she can talk to.
Noah Feldman:And just parenthetically, Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize winner, famous for writing an incredible book, Books of Jacob, about the emergence of some kind of a Polish identity via a Jewish false Messiah, herself, someone very, very interested in the multiple components of Polish identity.
Marta Figlerowicz:Yes. And Mitzkevich incidentally was probably descended from a family of Frankist Jews, which makes him even more interesting. The romantic movement in Poland again coincides with the loss of Polish statehood. And it's striking, I mean, not to diss earlier Polish writers, but it's really the first time Poland has a whole movement of independent, genuinely creative, genuinely major literary output. Like previously there had been kind of isolated people, coderies, but a lot of it is in conversation with Western courts.
Marta Figlerowicz:Some of it is translations of Petrarchan sonnets. There's relatively little compared to the Romantic period when there's really an explosion of very interesting, very original writing in Polish. And a lot of it has to do with needing to imagine Poland as a space that is now gone, and of needing to imagine what it was when it was, and what binds together the community of people who all happen to live in those territories. It's a time of huge reckoning with Poland's class distinctions, which are really caste distinctions. I mean, serfdom was only fully abolished in all of Poland in 1930.
Marta Figlerowicz:Like 1930. It's very late. So for most of Poland's existence really up to the Second World War, the peasants and the aristocracy are kind of a world apart. If you're born a peasant, stay a peasant and you kind of have to stay in your village. The mediators who go between them, the merchant class, are for the most part Jewish or occasionally Czech or Hungarian, but they're foreigners ethically construed.
Marta Figlerowicz:So you have this kind of deeply divided society in which suddenly people are asking: so what does unite us? Like, why would it matter for all of us to have a state in common? And a lot of people don't think that's really the case. Like, there's a lot of peasant revolts against the aristocrats that coincide with the loss of independence that also show the aristocrats that they're not really wanted here. So Mitzkevich is one of the poets who really tries to paint as honest a picture as possible of the failures that led to the fall of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, but also to insist on like some kind of unity, cultural, national, what have you, that connects people in Poland.
Marta Figlerowicz:A lot of his most powerful poems and plays are about summoning ghosts, whether it through folk ceremonies or just with ghosts visiting people. And this question of listening to history within a religious model that is partly Catholic inflected but partly a semi imagined pagan rite.
Noah Feldman:Now a lot of nationalisms, all of which are coming into existence in this romantic period, a lot of them start with, we used to have something really amazing and now it's long gone. We hearken back to it. In a sense, every romanticism is a make a fill in the blank great again movement in some way. But often they have a picture of some moment when everything was great, and they want to go back to that moment. For Mitzkevich, it seems like he can't quite bring himself to say that everything was great in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth because he recognizes the gap between the Polish aristocracy and the Polish peasants in that period of time.
Noah Feldman:And Jan Yun seems to be pointing us in that direction because there's a kind of class problem. She was a member of the Communist Party for a long time. And so class has to be, and she was educated in a communist milieu, class has to be predominant. And there's a huge class problem in that form of nationalism. Does Metskianich have an answer to that of any kind?
Noah Feldman:And maybe more importantly, does Janjon have an answer to that problem?
Marta Figlerowicz:That is a really good question. The short answer is no. The longer answer is yes, maybe. So Janjon, like a lot of what she works through in those essays is also the fear of bad nationalism. And the question of is there even such a thing as a good nationalism?
Marta Figlerowicz:Like, is it possible to just like think your country is kind of nice but not tilt from that too and therefore I must murder other people or and therefore I must excise the foreigners, which is very much also a question for America today, frankly. So she insists in opposition to people like Zizek, another great Eastern European critical theorist, that it has to be possible to kind of accept where you're from and to appreciate it and to love it in a way that doesn't become violent, in a way that doesn't lead to a kind of utopian quixotic but also a deeply hateful pursuit of some impossible past or future or future past, as the case may be.
Noah Feldman:Let's talk about that first in the context of Ukraine. This is again, like just totally, totally fascinating. The idea that Polish nationalism is partly fantasizing about governing Ukraine, right? I mean, now we're in a world where that's part of
Marta Figlerowicz:the Oh yes, but it's always about Russian The Polish fantasy, really. Yeah.
Noah Feldman:It's all, the Polish fantasy, maybe even before it was the Russian fantasy. Who fantasized about governing Ukraine first? How does that fantasy fit with a nationalism? I mean, for the Russians, we kind of know roughly how they get there, right? Ukraine, they just think of as properly Russian.
Noah Feldman:They see Ukrainian as like an underdeveloped form of the Russian language. And of course there are Russian speaking Ukrainians as well. They've got a pan Slavic vision that fits into it. And they've got an army to back it up. Poland at no time in the last few hundred years has had the military capacity actually to govern Ukraine.
Noah Feldman:But the governance of Ukraine was nevertheless a key part, as I learned from reading this, a key part of Polish national imagining an identity and the kind of idea of the Ukrainian Steppes as this extraordinary undeveloped space that can be dominated. And Jan Yun makes the comparison several times to Edward Said's notion of orientalism, similar, is actually central. So how does that work for a nationalism, where the nationalism fantasizes about governing some people who are not themselves ethnically Polish?
Marta Figlerowicz:Yeah, it is a good question. And it comes partly from kind of the vagaries of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, kind of when the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, which is the biggest version of a state that Poland ever had in Europe, extending, as my very nationalistic relatives would like to say, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. So that was an inherently multicultural initiative. Like it was run by a king who was himself Lithuanian by origin. It also created kind of, as you're saying, rapidly creates a lot of ethnic divisions in which the Polish people who, when they were closer to the West, felt dominated by the Germans, the French.
Marta Figlerowicz:In the East they felt like they were the bringers of western culture eastward. They also had a kind of quasi autocratic rule in their estates because there was very little oversight. So it was a space of huge overreaches of power for which the Ukrainian people were rightly and continue to be rightly very angry with Poland and that chapter of its history.
Noah Feldman:Or at least with the Polish aristocracy.
Marta Figlerowicz:Exactly. For the Polish aristocracy, it kind of fed into a myth of the self made Polish aristocrat who brings civilization to those immensely fertile lands that kind of look like the steppes. And again, recalling that at that point the Polish aristocracy believed themselves to be descended, many of them, from nomadic peoples of the Russian Steppe. So it all kind of comes together into a mythologizing Polish people as both Eastern in the sense of being connected to the great expanse of nature, but also Western in the sense of being the seat of culture, the seat of dominance and having another people to dominate. So like when you think about it, it's tremendously nefarious.
Marta Figlerowicz:But in part because of the language barrier, like there was very little conversation about the huge inequalities that created and the huge ethnic tensions that created really until the eruptions of violence that happened towards the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth century.
Noah Feldman:But there's a previous run of violence, which is also mentioned in the book, you know, to a kind of, again, a cursory historical version of this, which is all that most of us have. We think of the Cossack movements of the seventeenth century and especially the Khmanetsky uprising in terms of an oppressed Ukrainian peasantry, angry at two groups of people. They're angry at the Polish aristocracy, and they're angry at the middleman merchant class of Jews. And they rebel really against the former, but they can't really get that much access to the former. So on their way to pushing back, the people who are more in their line of fire tend to be the latter, the merchant Jews.
Noah Feldman:So in that sense, mean, you might ask, would the name Chmelnytsky be known to anybody outside of Eastern And Central Europe were it not for his massacres of Jews, of tens of thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of Jews? Think the answer is probably no. That's what he's remembered for in Western historical memory rather than in the region itself. It was really interesting to me to read that the Cossacks are actually ambivalent figures from the standpoint of the Polish imagination.
Marta Figlerowicz:Yeah. And I think the standing of the Cossack also changes under communism because then they become the oppressed working class who stands up to the Polish aristocracy. But Cossacks to the Romantics are something like Byronic heroes. They're the eastern other who is usually ethnically darker, who rides a horse better than the aristocrat does and who's quote unquote wilder, more in touch with nature. It's everything the romantics love.
Marta Figlerowicz:It's a Byronic hero. Again, the fascination with the Cossacks as both representing the Polish historical, social, structural oppressions that the Polish nationalists preferred to forget, but also representing a certain idea of manhood that emerged within that oppression. Like so many of those symbols that she talks about that she powerfully shows are like double edged.
Noah Feldman:Super, super, super interesting. I mean, I was accustomed to the idea that the Cossack mythology is important to the creation of Ukrainian national identity. And like a lot of American Jews descended from Eastern European Jews, grew up with plenty of accounts of the Cossacks as the people you're afraid of who are coming to get you. And that I think contributed in part to American Jewish skepticism of Ukrainian nationalism. I mean, I think the American Jewish community broadly ended up siding with Ukraine against Russia, but it took some belt tightening, if you will, because of a kind of inherited transgenerational feeling of you look at a Ukrainian nationalist and you see a trend of antisemitism that goes straight back to the heroizing of the Cotsak class.
Noah Feldman:And I sort of had imagined that the Polish intelligentsia would think more like the Jews than the Ukrainians on this, but it turns out that's not quite right. It is possible to imagine the Cossacks as great, even if they were fighting against Polish rule effectively in Ukraine.
Marta Figlerowicz:Oh, yes. And in a lot of the great Polish historical romances, it's always the Cossack and the Polish noblemen who are fighting for the same woman. And she's torn.
Noah Feldman:Right. Because it's a worthy adversary, which is one of the great insights of romanticism, at least when you're looking at it in terms of how you think about your enemy, that suddenly, I mean, Isaiah Berlin liked to emphasize this point, who was not primarily thought of as a literary scholar, but his essays and lectures on romanticism are still incredible reading, even though a lot of what he had to say is now superseded by later scholarship. But one of the insights that I always take away from his lectures is that in romanticism, you look at your enemy, not as just someone to be destroyed the way you might've thought even in the enlightenment, but as a worthy adversary whom you can therefore romanticize and think of as pretty cool in his own way. So, okay, I touched on my own interest in the Jewish question here, but let's talk about Janjon's. And I think that sort of comes in two different parts.
Noah Feldman:One is she has a fascinating essay that you translated here about Mitzgevich's quasi utopian messianic fantasy of a military legion of Jews who would participate with the Polish army in the struggle for Polish nationalism. And then secondarily, in terms of her own traumatic experience of being a non Jew who watched Jews being taken away ultimately to executed from Vilnius. Start with Mitzkevich, if you will, and his Jewish legion, or at least Jewish regiment. There's some debate about whether it's a legion or regiment and the details there.
Marta Figlerowicz:That's right. Yeah. So Miskiewicz, he spent his early life writing heroic poetry with Byronic heroes. And then he kind of became discouraged by kind of poetry. Like he came to doubt whether poetry really can change anything about the world.
Marta Figlerowicz:He decided he actually needed to do diplomacy, which he was not quite as good at and disillusioned him even more. But one of his big ideas was to create a Jewish legion alongside the Polish legions that were amassing in the Ottoman Empire for and for that army to go against Russia, to liberate the borderlands, the so called borderlands. So Poland, but emphatically in a present day Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania. And so the Polish so called legions in Turkey were themselves like in a fascinating phenomenon so Polish noblemen realized that after Napoleon failed them and could not liberate Poland did not want to liberate Poland, they realized the next best empire that was enemies with all of the relevant nations was the Ottoman Empire. A whole generation of Polish soldiers converted to Islam because that was a requirement and they began to head those Polish regiments that they hoped would be allowed to march against Russia.
Marta Figlerowicz:So Mitskevich's idea was to also have a Jewish legion as part of that, to kind of harness a Jewish anti Russian feeling. And what he saw so he had this theory that was kind of deeply utopian, deeply mystical, very problematic, possibly related to the Frankist history that you were just touching on.
Noah Feldman:Certainly parallel to it, whether it was derivative it or not, because Frank also went to the Ottoman Empire, also converted to Islam with his followers, although they later converted to Catholicism and also was fantasizing. And this is all pretty much in the realm of fantasy on both sides, of a kind of quasi Jewish, but really mixed identity group that would then come to power in Poland.
Marta Figlerowicz:Yeah.
Noah Feldman:About one hundred years before Minskipic. Yeah,
Marta Figlerowicz:exactly. But that might be the cultural milieu where he was raised, which is also significant. But so he felt that for the Jewish people, so he really identified, hyper identified over identified the Polish national struggle with the Jewish struggle to exist as a stateless people. And he believed that just as the Polish people would be heartened and changed, transformed by being able to have armies of their own that were Polish, so with the Jewish people. And part of what's fascinating about that history is that even though that legion didn't really work out it was more like a regiment really to begin with a lot of his ideas through his Jewish secretary trickled over into early Zionist thought.
Marta Figlerowicz:So there is actually kind of intellectual line of connection from Mitzkevich wanting to create a Jewish army and of Herzl thinking about it sometime later. And part of what's also fascinating is that, like, one of the things that Mitzkevich could not understand and that was really like a problem in his plans that he couldn't face was that whenever he talked to the Jewish regiment, he was like, let's all go liberate Poland. The Jewish regiment would say that we would actually prefer to go to Israel. And this question of like, is Poland really the seat of the Jewish people?
Noah Feldman:That's the kind of grand theme hiding behind here. And it's fascinating to think about it. And it's a good segue to talking about the Holocaust, just because if we can pretend for the sake of argument, which you really should be doing if you're thinking about the nineteenth century, that we don't know what's coming, it was 1939. For Jews, Poland was the kind of best case scenario for a substantial part of nearly a thousand years. And there's Polish myth and Jewish myth, each of which probably has meaningful historical underpinnings of the kind of open invitation of Jews from Western Europe to come and live in Poland.
Noah Feldman:And the kind of historical backdrop to this is usually thought to be self conscious strategy of Polish monarchs to try to turn Poland into more economically forward looking state by importing a merchant class that was also a class that could provide some basic forms of capital, and therefore inviting Jews to come to Poland, to the Polish cities, with the promise of a legal status guaranteed by the monarchy, which would be better than that of a peasant, though not that of an aristocrat. And this is remembered in both traditions. And it works as it were for a very, very, very long time. And you can sort of see the appeal of that from a Polish nationalist perspective, and also from a Jewish perspective insofar as Jews were looking, as many were, for something other than a Zionism. Since at least in the early nineteenth century, you don't really have a fully born Zionism yet.
Noah Feldman:And there's something appealing about this. You see it in Miskivyc and you also can see it in Janjon. It's a kind of fantasy of what it would look like in a make Poland great again structure, where Jews are equal citizens, peasants are equal citizens, aristocrats are reduced from aristocratic status to equality, although they might still be aristocrats of the spirit. And then that becomes a kind of romantic picture, utopian, messianic, romantic picture of a Poland.
Marta Figlerowicz:No, that is exactly right. And the kind of the darker underpinning underneath that is, of course, that, as you said, the Jewish inhabitants of Poland were the merchant class that prevented Poland from looking explicitly like a feudal state that kind of gave Poland the veneer of modernity. Whereas a lot of kind of contemporary political theorists will tell you Poland really remained essentially a nonmodern state until 1945.
Noah Feldman:Yeah. And that's rural Poland, because if you read the literature of urban Poland, even in the interwar period, especially, and this has been very well developed by a lot of Jewish historians and historians of Yiddish literature, you see remarkable degrees of modernization within the urbanized Jewish community. In fact, one of the big insights of that field of study has been to show that the American Jewish fantasy of sort of feather on the roof, that all the Jews living in the Pale of Settlement, including and extended in Poland, were living in villages, is just false, that there were these very large urbanized Jewish populations that were extremely modern in a wide range of ways, intellectually, economically, practically. And so that leads to my kind of like punchline question on this, which is, Yan Yun is writing about this, which is kind of incredible that she's able to write about it in the communist period and even afterwards. The skeptic wants to say, yeah, but like, look how it ended up.
Noah Feldman:You get the genocide. And no, it's not the Poles who bring about the genocide. There are Poles who are willing not to be partisans and to be on the other side and to be supportive of it. And then Poland itself becomes the location of a significant number of most, certainly the best known death camps. Poland then goes from being a thousand years of the greatest homeland of Jews in Eastern Central Europe to being the greatest cemetery.
Noah Feldman:And so then looking back at this messianic utopian fantasy of everyone getting along, it's hard to First of all, it's hard to replicate it. But once you get it, once you can get it into your head, I think she does a really good job of letting us do, you then have to ask yourself, as with all messianic images, was it a good one? Was it totally misplaced? Was this an imaginary world that just had no chance of coming into existence? And if that's so, is it because ordinary Poles who were descended of peasants were not going to have the elite intellectualized view of the role of the Jews in the life of Poland that urbanized intellectuals like Jan Yun did?
Marta Figlerowicz:Yeah. What also complicates that picture is, so she writes about the Jewish Legion after '68, after the expulsion of Jewish members of the Communist Party from Poland. And also at a time when I think it's very difficult to overestimate from an American perspective just how little the Holocaust was talked about in Poland after the Second World War. I mean, even when I was growing up, like one of the reasons one of the first things I did when I came to Harvard as I learned Yiddish is I had this feeling there was something I was not being told, which my grandmother would just get very upset and like shut down about if I ever tried to talk about it. And like when you visited Auschwitz, you were told that millions of Polish people died there.
Marta Figlerowicz:You were not told that those Polish people were also ethnically Jewish. So she's speaking back to what is at that time a huge and very pointed historical gap. There's also so that essay about the Jewish legion is much longer in the original. A lot of what I cut out was just her like hacking away at anti Semitic Polish romanticists who are just saying surely Mitzkevich could not have meant that like surely he was not actually talking to the Jewish people that he like it's an accident that his secretary happened to be Jewish, kind of completely denying the messianism. So I think what she's trying to defend is kind of a more capacious sense of communal utopia in which kind of communal belonging is broad enough to encompass multiculturalism, as we would call it.
Marta Figlerowicz:But also to reckon with the fact, more importantly to her, that this history that people are long for and are romanticizing was actually a multicultural history. Necessarily so.
Noah Feldman:You're really hitting on what I think of as the deepest problem also in contemporary attempts to make sense of the legacy of Zionism. And I think here, Zionism and Polish nationalism are just two specific cases of a much more general question, which you could frame in a general way something like this. We know that nationalisms in their main have the tendency to eliminate, otherize, and sometimes actually deport or kill the others within the national space. And we know that there have always been, for what it's worth, if this terminology, and I'm not sure this is the right terminology, but enlightenment style romantics, who always said within our national movement, there will be room for multiculturalism and at the minimum toleration and at the maximum some incorporation into society of people who are ethnically different from us and whom we will call ethnic minorities, because we want to make sure that in our state, there'll be more of us than there are, but they're still human beings and they're still equal. I mean, you have this an important Zionist document, the Israeli Declaration of Independence of 1948, which says an ethically Jewish state with full and equal rights for non Jewish citizens of the state.
Noah Feldman:That's that same kind of image really that Jan Yon is talking about as trying to create in some way and that Mitzkevich was maybe also imagining. And the hard question is, and in the wake of Gaza, it's hard to avoid this question, that strand of nationalism generally always bullshit. It's a profound problem for all nationalisms, I think. Just happen to be seeing it expressed right now in the case of Zionism as a form of nationalism. And in Polish nationalism, arguably you could see it in the aftermath of World War where there are some Poles who are responding to Jews who are returning home, having survived the Holocaust with attacks that either kill them or lead them to leave.
Noah Feldman:You could do the same for all nationalisms, really. I'm not asking you that because I want you to have the definitive answer. I certainly don't. But I wonder how you would place Janjon in that kind of a debate about nationalism. Because she is in some important way a Polish nationalist, but she's a Polish nationalist that we can like because she's a cosmopolitan nationalist.
Marta Figlerowicz:Yeah. Which is such a paradoxical position. In some ways she's also kind of communist nationalist or like I think what she understands by nationalism is actually more like communitarianism. I think thinking realistically about the problem of culture to communism. Because one of the big problems of kind of establishing an international communist state is like what do you do with the local cultures?
Marta Figlerowicz:Like to what extent do they have to be unified? To what extent can they remain separate? And it's funny I was I once went to Uzbekistan and I flew this tiny little plane to Nokuz, which is the site of where Stalin had hidden the great regionalist modernist treasures of the Soviet Union before the Second World War. The regionalist art from all over the Soviet Union. But then he never brought it back to Moscow after the Second World War, because at that point it had become passe.
Marta Figlerowicz:This notion of kind of celebrating local cultural color as it were. And I think that is a kind of live question. Like that's the million dollar question for democracy in general, like the question that even enlightened democracies like the Scandinavian ones are facing with immigration. Kind of at what point do you like have to muster a sense of relationality or cultural togetherness to get people to pay taxes and to take care of each other? And how do you prevent people from saying like, well, I don't want to pay taxes for that person because they don't think like me or look like me.
Marta Figlerowicz:And I think Jan Yon's paradoxical answer is to say, no, look, the problem is if you're going to try to do it abstractly, you will always lose. If you're going to try to do it by creating a sense of belonging, sometimes you get nationalism of the vicious sense, but sometimes you can get something else. And the question is, how do you enter that gamble?
Noah Feldman:Yeah. I mean, I think the problem you're describing, as you mentioned earlier, is directly a problem for us in The United States now. The kind of standard liberal, classically liberal answer to this problem has been, well, there's a form of democratic identity that is universalizing. And it's the form of The United States. It's arguably the form of France after France in its spirit of being Republican France.
Noah Feldman:You could look like anything, but if you speak French, you're French and you get your Liberte, your Egalite, your Fratellite. If you're American, you're a citizen, and it doesn't matter what you look like. You can maintain your ethnic identity in various ways, but you're a citizen of The United States and you're fully equal. And then Trumpism calls that into question by saying, Here's an important form of American identity that's more nationalist. And it does say that there's a difference between a quote unquote true American and another kind of American.
Noah Feldman:It's ambivalent about that, but it does say it. And Le Pen's version of France, the National Front version of France gives the same thing. So even in those two countries, which were always cited in the political science textbooks as outliers from pure nationalism, the problem is here. And in nationalist countries, the problem is as visible as it could possibly be. To me, that was one of the most relevant things about reading the Yanyon, that even in an openly nationalist framework, she's trying to develop a version of national identity that is still compatible with treating people equally.
Noah Feldman:So I want to now come to, which would be our last topic, but very much not the least, which is Janjon's own identity. Assume we know nothing about what it was like to be queer in post World War II Poland and under communism.
Marta Figlerowicz:Yeah. So Janjon only really explicitly came out in the segment of the interview that I translate in the interviews section of the book where she just says: Yep, I used to pick up girls when I was in underground middle school. It was great. For the most part I was successful. But then she kind of refuses to say anything about her actual longer term relationships, even though some of the people she had been involved with over the years ended up writing little Brahma accled novels about that.
Marta Figlerowicz:And she's very much toeing the line here between like refusing to be activist or perhaps feeling like she cannot be activist in the world she's in but also citing queer like bringing queer theory into Poland like citing openly gay writers in a kind of sophisticated and careful way. The discourse of queerness is itself complicated to bring in because it's a Western discourse and because this whole problem of like is sexuality or identity is a very Western way of posing the question. I wish I could have talked to somebody like her about this. But there was definitely a lot of kind of just general Catholic shame around it. But on the other hand, the Polish, the Slavic stereotype of a woman is, let's just say you're allowed to be much more butch a certain context than you are in America, which is always funny.
Marta Figlerowicz:I can be wearing the same thing in Poland and in America. In Poland, people understand that I'm a woman, even if they think I'm probably a spinster, like left for hopeless. Whereas in America, people are just like, what are you? Which speaks, I think, to different kind of boundaries of gender representation and different boundaries of what is possible. And I think in that regard, I find her to be very interesting in just reminding us there are different models of like living a queer life, as we would now call it, which certainly were repressive in many ways.
Marta Figlerowicz:But in other ways, I think the kinds of choices she had and the kinds of choices that she felt were meaningful to her were just different. It's more about a certain individual freedom to desire than it is about like identifying yourself with a particular direction of that desire. I wonder also how much of it again, this is pure speculation, but I don't know many other people of her generation that were even as open as she was about being queer. Like, I wonder how much of it was also about covering up for partners who just did not want to be taken out of the closet.
Noah Feldman:You had to put a lot of time and effort into this project. What for you at a personal level, having done this really remarkable project, which has to have taken up a lot of your intellectual time, I mean, write books incredibly fast anyway, but what are the things that you feel that you got most out of it and that you want readers to get?
Marta Figlerowicz:That is a great question. In a very personal way, it was just amazing to follow the arc of a very long academic career and to think about how thinking thoughts takes a long time. The best books that she wrote that are the books through which I found her, she wrote when she was in her late 60s. And I like to joke that it's great to be a humanities professor because the older you are, the better you get. And then by the time you start to decline, you probably are not noticing it anyway.
Marta Figlerowicz:It was unlike the mathematician who kind of peaks at 30 and then like lives in the shadow of their former self for the rest of their glorious career. And I think like the slow process of mulling things over, of seeing different angles and also of integrating the personal and the academic and the political in non obvious, non kind of hamfisted ways. We have a lot of models around us of doing that very hamfistedly, which I kind of very early on refused to do. I refused to kind of do Polish studies in part because I was like, if you don't tell me to study Polish literature just because I'm Polish. And I think she's helped me come back to it in a very different way.
Marta Figlerowicz:Also, because she shows a different kind of less self obsessed, as you might put her, a less myopic view of what it means to try to think from a position of relating to people around you from within your embodiment. And as you say, trying to create a community with them that's as utopian as possible.
Noah Feldman:I really relate to those takeaways. I mean, it took me to my tenth book to write a book that was explicitly about a Jewish topic because I was repressing it the whole way. And you get to a point when you're like, okay, maybe something will enable me to get back to this. And I think it's great that Nanyuan is helping you get back to one of the many facets of your intellectual and personal existence. And the second is, I think what you said is really profound, that the reason that the humanities have value is also the reason that it takes a while to get good at them.
Noah Feldman:The process of understanding being human requires you to live as a human for a while.
Marta Figlerowicz:Yes. And do different human things that sometimes takes you away from books.
Noah Feldman:Yeah. Whereas if you're a mathematician or a physicist, if you have the CPU to do it, you can do it as long as you have some of the basic knowledge of the field, and you can make incredible breakthroughs that are profound and transformational because you don't have to have a relevant set of human experiences to have them. You have to have an intellectual process, but you don't necessarily have to have the experiential side. I'm older than you are, but I love and agree with the thought that if you're a humanist, you can always look forward to the next thing on the theory that maybe you'll be wiser this time. I see it as this transition between being young and very, very, very smart.
Noah Feldman:And I met you when you were that. And moving gradually towards middle age with the hopes of emerging on the other side as being really, really, really wise.
Marta Figlerowicz:It feels so much better to understand that as the path, honestly, and so much more hopeful.
Noah Feldman:Marta, thank you for this interview. Thank you for an amazing, amazing contribution to, really a contribution to knowledge. Thank you for the book. It's amazing.
Marta Figlerowicz:Thank you, Noah. And thank you. That was an amazing conversation.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book of the Bad Child, a Maria Janion Reader, translated by Marta Figlerovich, is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.