Poland: A Study of the Land People and Literature/Part 1/Chapter 1
I
JOURNEY FROM VIENNA TO WARSAW—THE FRONTIER—CUSTOM-HOUSE INSPECTION
At 11 o'clock in the forenoon on the 3rd of February the train left the city of Hans Makart and Johann Strauss, and thoughts and memories of Vienna long continued to revolve in my brain; cheerful thoughts and bright memories of captivating friendliness, of cordiality, of warmth of feeling, of the ardour of the moment; of the well-turned speeches of journalists and ex-ministers, the improvisations of young poets, the smiles of elegant women, the jokes and laughter of beautiful soubrettes, the importunities of ladies athirst for literature and autographs; of the pompous marble halls of Theophilus Hansen, the slovenly splendour of the Makart Exhibition, and the cosy room where the King of the Waltz gives his recitals of works, which it is true are only very small works of art, but still genuine art; and for a time I still inhaled the atmosphere of peaceful extravagance, of reckless but kindly joy of life, of amiable second-rate happiness, which fills one's lungs in the great witches' cauldron called Vienna.
Vienna is a city of freedom from restraint. How bright are words, hues, and music there!
If the inhabitants of Berlin have appropriated to themselves the dignity of Schiller's Anmuth und Würde,[1] grace has become the inheritance of the Viennese. For this is a city by itself, which everything becomes, for it has sound sense enough not to do anything but what is becoming. How rich in recollections and picturesque is it, how rich in strong traditions in comparison with modern regular Berlin! And how beautiful is the vicinity, how full of character is the peasants' costume here in the region which we are going through, the long white cloaks with red borders, and how well they know how to wear their clothes in comparison with the North German peasants in their stiff, ugly costume!
Austria is a rich land in a comparatively peaceful state of dissolution, where there are many kinds of men, but no Austrians. It is true we must except the imperial family and one or two antiquities of the old Constitutionalists. Besides these there are only Germans in Vienna, as outside Vienna there are only Hungarians, Czechs, &c.
The train rushes on. A little Polish servant, accompanying a traveller, calls my attention to a young Russian, who now and then spoke French to him. "He knows very well that I understand Russian, but still he speaks French to me; that is the way with them all; they are at heart ashamed of being Russians," an extremely naïve but very significant expression of Polish national hatred.
To profit by the daylight while it lasts, I read Sienkiewicz's "Bartek Vainqueur" in the Nouvelle Revue. . . .
The train stopped at Granica, the frontier station. Passports have to be inspected and baggage examined. A blond Russian police soldier, in his becoming uniform, a long grey coat, a cap without a vizor, a sabre at his side, entered, demanded the passports and carried them away.
Then we received permission and orders to alight. When a traveller suggested that we could leave our rugs, overcoats, and articles of that kind in the carriage, since we were to return to the same train in an hour, the little Pole informed him of his mistake: "Everything must be taken out; even an umbrella left behind excites suspicion, and if a coat is left, the lining is examined."
The first things found in my travelling-bag were the two numbers of the Nouvelle Revue, which I had been reading in the carriage.
"What is this?" asked the chief of the uniformed custom-house officers in German.
"What is it?" I answered. "It is the Nouvelle Revue."
"Yes, but what is that?"—"A French periodical."—"What does it contain?"—"Do you understand French?" I asked.—"No."—"Is there any one here who understands French?"—"No."—"There are all sorts of things in it; there are two numbers and there are ten articles in each number. It is impossible to tell in a word what they contain."—"Then we shall take it and send it to the censor in Warsaw."—"Is this periodical forbidden?"—"Everything is forbidden that I do not know, and I do not know this book." He then began to flutter among the leaves, forwards and backwards, and seemed to look for papers concealed in the sheets that had not been cut. I was reminded of the old lithograph which represents a monkey rifling the handbag of a traveller and fumbling in his books.
"Have you any more of this sort?"—"Yes, my trunk is half-full of books." They were going to open it, when I heard from another officer the expression, revolver, which I understood, as the word is cosmopolitan. They had found a pistol in my hand-bag. It circulated among them and was examined. "Was it loaded?"—"Yes, with six balls."—"Would I be kind enough to take them out?" I declined decidedly to be kind enough. "Then we must." They extracted the balls and afterwards found in the bottom of my trunk a little box of balls, which was put with the pistol.
Then began the examination proper. Every book, every pamphlet was dug out and laid aside; every newspaper, even the newspapers in which my shoes were wrapped, were taken out, smoothed, and laid in a pile. They asked in what language the books were and what was in them. As my explanation was not found fully satisfactory, they took the whole from me, giving me a receipt for 15 pounds of literature. At the same time they demanded three rubles for the transportation of this same literature to Warsaw. I should have attempted bribery, if Poles had not previously told me that above all things, bribery must not be tried in the wrong place. I should run the risk of their taking the attempt as a proof of evil intentions. It was in vain that I urged that I needed the books which they took from me for my work in Warsaw. It was in vain that I called their attention to the fact that they might safely leave me the Danish books and newspapers, since no harm could be done with them in Poland, where no one understands Danish. "In the censor's office they understand all languages," was the answer.—"Grant that that is true, although I have my doubts; but the government censor, who is Russian, I cannot corrupt, and the other people do not understand Danish, do they?"—"That is true from your point of view," was the answer, and, acting from their point of view, they kept the books. There was a Danish-French dictionary in the heap; I showed them that it was a dictionary, that the words were arranged in columns. They racked their brains over it. At last, after mature reflection they gave me the first part, A—L, but with very serious looks replaced part M—Z among the literature which the censor was to examine.
"When and how can I get all this again?"—"So far as the books are concerned you can ask for them at the censor's office; you have a receipt for them. You will get no receipt for the pistol. But you may address a petition—on a whole sheet of paper—to the Governor-General for permission to carry it, then, if he thinks fit, he can give an order to the custom-house officer in Warsaw to deliver it to you on your application there."[2]
Thus on the very frontier itself we got the feeling that from this point we were outside the precincts of real European civilisation.
In such a trifling matter as the custom-house examination the two distinguishing marks of the bulk of Russian prudential regulations can be traced: the oppressive and the inconsequent. If I had known of the prohibition against having a pistol in my travelling bag, all I needed to do was to put it into my pocket; for the pockets are not searched. If I had known that it was forbidden to carry foreign books, I might have sent them from Vienna to a bookseller in Warsaw, and I should have received them without any delay.
The government regulations are not strict enough, and yet so strict that, for fear of dismissal, the subordinate officials are compelled to carry out their duty brutally as well as injudiciously. The absurdities which met me on the frontier, continually meet the foreigner and sometimes the native born. A few years ago, on the Prusso-Russian frontier, one of my friends, who had prepared himself for the medical examination in Warsaw at the time when the University was still Polish, but who was compelled to submit to the examination after it had become Russian, had a Russian grammar, written in Russian, taken from him because the custom-house official did not know the book.
The Russian rule is not like the Prussian, prudent and uniform; it is incoherent, absurd, and often entrusted to clumsy hands. The pressure upon Russian Poland is so great that it could not be borne for a month if many of the regulations were not chaotic and meaningless, others too trivial to be executed, others easily avoided by bribery, others entrusted to instruments of so little keenness that their effect is destroyed, and others again to such intelligent and cultivated men that they are not put into practice.
I had accepted an invitation to deliver three lectures in French in the town-hall of Warsaw. In regard to these lectures I had many difficulties beforehand. I was compelled to prepare them in time to send the manuscript to Warsaw a month before my arrival, as they were to be submitted to a double censorship, the usual one, and a special one for public lectures. Since it was certain that if they were sent by the ordinary post they would be detained for an indefinite period at the frontier, it was necessary to find a more convenient means of transit. Ambassadorial courtesy enabled me to send them by a special hand to St. Petersburg. Thus they reached their destination without any other delay than that caused by the round-about journey. Two copies were prepared and sent to the different censors, but after they had twice been read through in French, a day or two before my arrival in Warsaw a new difficulty arose. The well-known curator of the education department, Apuchtin—the same person who had his ears boxed by a student a year ago, which created a commotion and tumult in the whole city—at the last moment required that all three lectures should be sent in again in a Russian translation. This and the further examination naturally took time. Nevertheless, to the astonishment of many, not a line was struck out, although the lectures contained not a little which, as it appeared, excited emotion in the listeners. I was told also that the strictness of the censorship was sometimes neutralised by the carelessness or chivalrousness of the examiner; it seems as if the censor stationed in the hall did not always note very exactly if what is said is really identical with what the lecturer has handed in in his manuscript.
It appears here, as in innumerable other cases in Russia, that an order or prohibition in order to be absolutely effective requires a whole system of additional regulations. This is especially so when the prohibition against printing anything has a practical object. In January the celebrated old poet Odyniec died in Warsaw. He was the faithful friend and youthful travelling companion of Mickiewicz, politically a neutral, almost a conservative; but as his name was so intimately associated with memories of the revolt of 1830 and of the period of literary splendour, as, moreover, he had been so close a friend of Mickiewicz, the most celebrated enemy of the Russian authority, they endeavoured by means of the censor to prevent demonstrations at his funeral. Consequently it was forbidden to give any public notice of the time of his interment, not only in the newspapers, but by the placards which are commonly posted in the streets and before the churches. The prohibition was enforced, but in spite of it a procession of 50,000 persons followed Odyniec to his grave.
It is thus that prohibition and censorship only succeed in acquiring a character for ineffectual spite. This is notably the case with the Polish press. It continually happens that an article is forbidden by the censor on a particular day, but a day or two later the author is allowed to make free use of it. The result of this is only that the suspected newspapers are behind their rivals in the discussion of the subjects of the day. It continually happens also that an article is forbidden by the censor in one newspaper and allowed in another.
The passport system has the same character of annoyance without profit as this form of censorship. Without a passport, viséd by the Russian consul in your place of residence, generally speaking, you cannot cross the frontier into Russia. It is called for, as already stated, in the railway carriage, it is examined in a separate room during the time while the baggage is being searched, and they are so concerned to prevent the traveller from handing it over to some offender or the other, that he does not get his passport back till after he has taken his seat in the train, immediately before the last ringing of the bell; a police soldier brings the passports in a case prepared for the purpose with alphabetical letterings. You hardly reach your place of destination before the passport is again called for; it is taken to the police office and kept there during the whole stay of the traveller in the city, and the information there given is supplemented by inquiries of the servants in the house where you reside as to the full names of your parents, whether you are married or unmarried — the unmarried are regarded as the more dangerous — as to several matters. And this passport, which is only given back on the day of departure, is examined again for an hour at the station on the frontier through which you pass on your return journey.
Nevertheless this vigilance also has a gap by which its results are almost wholly destroyed. There is hardly any attempt to ascertain whether the person named in the passport is the same who has presented it. They evidently have no means of knowing whether the name is right, but as the passports are examined en bloc in a separate room from that in which the travellers are collected, they do not attempt to find out if the description corresponds with the person. As nothing is easier than to procure a passport in Germany, Austria, England or France, and then remain at home and let a friend travel with it, the result is wholly out of proportion to the trouble and annoyance—to say nothing of the fact that hundreds who have no passports are daily guided over the frontier on foot by men who are pointed out to every one who needs them.
I had abundant opportunity of thinking over this subject, as during the tiresome delay I walked up and down among the tea- and grog-drinking idlers in the dirty waiting-room at Granica, annoyed by intruders anxious to change my Austrian money into rubles, consoled by others who explained to me that the officials were quite within their rights in their treatment of me; that the fact of my books being in Danish was no security; who could vouch for it, that they did not contain accounts of the socialist congress in Copenhagen!
At last I got back what was left in my trunk for my own disposal, and without anything contraband except what I had in my head, I arrived the next morning in Warsaw.
- ↑ Grace and Dignity.
- ↑ During my stay in Warsaw, in spite of my request, he did not give the order. When one of my friends, after my return to Copenhagen, applied on my behalf to the Governor-General for the delivery or return of this weapon which was guiltless of shedding human blood, he received the following answer: He must (1) obtain from me a power of attorney certified by the Russian Consul in Copenhagen; (2) make application to the Governor-General for permission to take the said revolver over the frontier; (3) after having received permission, apply to the custom-house at Granica to send the pistol to the headquarters of the custom-house in Warsaw; (4) send the same by mail to Copenhagen and give proof to the office of the Governor-General that the revolver had actually been sent.