Five Easy Pieces? What Eliza Orzeszkowa’s early works presuppose

Grażyna Borkowska

Was Orzeszkowa interested in economics? Perhaps she was aware of Simonde de Sismondi because at the point when she first took an interest in the rational laws of social and economic development in the mid-1860s, the historian and economist was often mentioned in debates. An interesting story about Sismondi’s biography, included in Zofia Węgierska’s Kronika paryska [Paris Chronicle], may have found its way into her hands and piqued her interest. Węgierska noted in Biblioteka Warszawska (1864, vol. 1) that Sismondi, author of the sixteen-volume Histoire des républiques italiennes du Moyen Âge, 1807–1818, had no connection to either economics or history and was more interesting as a person than as a writer but still showed courage and a sense of responsibility when he sought to assist refugees and deserters from the French-Austrian-Russian front that at the turn of the nineteenth-century cut through Switzerland. She found that he enjoyed a particularly close relationship with his mother, one that we might today deem toxic but in the nineteenth century could be perceived as an element of a praiseworthy attachment to a loved one.^[1] Orzeszkowa might have learned about Sismondi from another source, too. During the physiocrat Hieronim Stroynowski’s term as rector of the University of Vilnius, when Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski held the chair in economics – a time before her birth but nevertheless a period when her enlightened father could collect information on local economic issues – a renowned economist was sought. Around the same time, Sismondi published De la richesse commerciale ou Principes d’économie politique (1803). He was offered a position at the university. He made significant financial demands and submitted an essay to the university, as required by the call for applications. His work compared the theory of the physiocrat François Quesnay with that of Adam Smith, who connected wealth to, among other things, labour. Stroynowski thus became aware just how much Sismondi’s thinking diverged from the ideas relating to physiocratic theory that he and the Vilnius physiocrat elite. He thus rejected Sismondi for the position.^[2] Węgierska in fact offers a different take on events suggesting that it was his mother, fearing separation from her son, who convinced him that it would be a mistake to take up the post in Vilnius. And so it was Sismondi, she argues, who broke off negotiations with the university. The study accompanying his application for the position, which might have irritated readers in Vilnius with its explicit suggestion that serfdom might have contributed to the collapse of Poland, was translated into Polish by Antoni Gliszczyński, an economist who had authored many studies on taxes. According to the historian Jerzy Jedlicki, Gliszczyński was the most bourgeois-minded Polish economist of the time and an enthusiastic supporter of industrialism.^[3] The work subsequently appeared in Pamiętnik Warszawski,^[4] which is how Orzeszkowa might have come across it, particularly since Sismondi’s sensibilities were not only economic but also social, something that might have attracted her.

Equally, though, as she worked on the novel, she might have been completely unaware of the work of this French-Italian economist who spent part of his life in Tuscany, part in Geneva and part in England, where he married Jenny Allen. They ultimately settled near Geneva. Indeed, Orzeszkowa did not refer to by name to any economists, except for Józef Supiński. However, her arguments, which were based around scientific, empirically-tested methods of rationalizing the economy, seemed generally aligned with expert knowledge of the time. Whether she was aware of certain studies or not, has no bearing on the presuppositions in this particular novel, while her earlier works revolved around economic issues. Assumed information, as Ducrot termed presuppositions, does not generally feature in the diegetic order of a novel (i.e. within the storyworld) and often exceeds the horizon of knowledge of the narrator or author of a work. Presuppositions provide the framework, on the one hand, for generalizations that universalize the meaning of a novel while on the other hand endowing it with specificity, locating the meanings in particular contexts. One way of reading Pan Graba is to show that it is not solely about depicting the moral and intellectual collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility, but instead depicts the broader issue of the need for running the national economy in a planned and rational fashion. From another point of view, however, the period around the Uprisings proved to be a second phase – after the Enlightenment-era boom – when Polish social elites adopted European economic thought, driven on by the poor state of the economy and the rise of social tensions. We cannot say for sure whether Orzeszkowa consciously participated in these types of activities or instead unconsciously referred to the tone and focus on the public discourse of the period and the self-evident social conditions and needs. However, this should not stop us from searching for new contexts nor should it deny the viability of the foundations for research into new categories potentially describing various aspects of the storyworld.