Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies Read Free Book Online Page A

move to close down either Roman Catholic churches or Jewish synagogues. Tsarist animosity focused on the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Uniates, who were treated as traitors to the nation. In 1839 and again in 1876 decrees were issued to ban Greek Catholicism outright and to force its adherents into Russian Orthodoxy. In order to practise their religion, many Uniates fled to Austrian-ruled Galicia.
    Nonetheless, despite the tensions, the human mass of the former grand duchy stayed largely in situ . For the first two or three generations, prevalent attitudes were characterized by mainly passive resistance to Russian rule, although it sporadically turned active. For two or three generations after that, the former grand duchy was deeply affected by the rise of a variety of new political and national movements. Until 1864, the sense of disillusionment was heightened by the bitter consequences of three successive failed risings – in 1812, 1830–31 and 1863–4. On each occasion, patriots from the former kingdom fought and died alongside volunteers from the former grand duchy, hoping that the late Rzeczpospolita could somehow be revived. On the contrary, the risings were crushed; repressions multiplied; tsarist rule was strengthened.
    The former grand duchy supplied many of the insurrectionary leaders. Romuald Traugutt (1826–64), head of a clandestine national government declared in Warsaw during the January Rising of 1863–4, was the son of a gentry family from the Brest palatinate. Jakub Gieysztor (1827–97), a Polish nobleman who had freed his Lithuanian serfs, believed that the rising was premature, but joined all the same. Antanas Mackievicˇius (1828–63), later seen as a Lithuanian nationalist, nonetheless fought for the restoration of the multinational grand duchy. Zygmunt Sierakowski (1826–64) led bands of rural guerrillas in Samogitia. Kastuś Kalinou˘  ski (1838–64), now counted among the pioneers of Belarusian identity, addressed social distress as well as national issues. All fought in vain. Traugutt and his associates were executed in front of Warsaw’s Russian citadel. Sierakowski and Kalinou˘  ski were executed in Vilnius. Their dreams of the grand duchy’s revival died with them.
    In this era of insurrections, the poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), born and raised in Novogrudok – the town in ‘Black Ruthenia’ where the very name of Litva was said to have been born – penned the most eloquent and lasting lament for the late grand duchy. His epic poem Pan Tadeusz (1834) has the subtitle ‘The Last Raid in Lithuania’, and describes the life of a rural community at the time of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812. In matchless language, it evokes both the colourful traditions of the past, and the dreams for liberation. Mickiewicz wrote in Polish, and the opening lines of Pan Tadeusz have become the most famous lines in the language:
O Litwo! Ojczyzno moja, Ty jesteś jako zdrowie.
Ile Cie˛ cenić trzeba, ten tylko sie˛ dowie,
Kto Cie˛ stracił. Dziś pie˛kność Twa˛ w całej ozdobie
Widze¸ i opisuje˛, bo te˛sknie˛ po Tobie.
    (‘O Litva! My homeland, you are like health. / How to gauge your worth, only he can know / who has lost you. Today I see your full beauty / and describe it, because I long for you.’) Irony of ironies, Poland’s national bard did not come from Poland. It is as if William Shakespeare had lived in Dublin. But such is his stature that Lithuanians, too, take ‘Adomas Mickievicˇius’ to be their own; and Belarusians consider ‘Mitskieyvitch’ to be theirs:

    All the millions of people who still read this poetry, translate it, learn it by heart, or teach and study it in school as part of the official curriculum, are perpetuating the grand duchy’s heritage.
    Opposition to tsarist rule after 1864 was channelled in new directions. The anarchists, for example, believed in direct action. The Narodna Vol�ya (‘National Will’) organization, attracted recruits from all