Hidden traces of distance, irony and disintegration

Geography in the novel, or what is known about topography, onomastics and temporality

From the outset, Orzeszkowa opts for a formula of suggestiveness, enigmaticity, and implied knowledge, providing a framework to guide the reader toward the mechanisms of deceit, glamour, and bigotry in the small-town world of gossip and living someone else’s life. She doesn’t entirely strive for an Aesopian approach, though there are many strongly legitimized and ambiguous attributes and personality traits, as well as physiognomy that fits the stratification of black-and-white characters, positive or negative behaviour, and attitudes. The two main characters stand out against the backdrop of straightforward, paper-thin characters. Through their examples, the young writer attempts to illustrate the nuances of psychology, the complexity and nuance of choices, and the dramas (if not existential tragedies), including those related to the necessity of choice. Here Orzeszkowa heads down the path of “casuistry of conscience” – as Stanisław Brzozowski argued in Nad Niemnem, and following the vigilant modernist critic, Józef Bachórz used this formula to diagnose the writer’s attitudes and the characters sketched by her. She is interested in issues of ethical responsibility, balancing private needs, reconciliation with one’s conscience, evaluating behaviour, and the code of socio-cultural and religious obligations. Maria Żmigrodzka additionally diagnosed: “[t]he ethical climate of Orzeszkowa’s thought allows us to state that it cannot be entirely confined within the bounds of positivism,” and from the very beginning of her creative work, “[a]ccording to the development of Orzeszkowa’s worldview, ethical issues also played a very important role in the study O powieściach T.T. Jeża.”

The novel begins with the outline of a universal situation, the image of any city and no city, of the everywhere-nowhere. This is characteristic of periphrasis and vagueness in fairy tales, which aim to present the world in its universality and the possibility of duplicating its image anywhere. This ambiguity is emphasized at the stylistic level by the semantically exclusive and parallel pairings of litotes and the expression “neither nor”: “On a certain beautiful and great river stands a certain city, neither very large nor very small, neither very beautiful nor very ugly” (chapter I). This enigmatic quality is reinforced (in the form of an indefinite pronoun) by the image of Spirydion As, visible later in the novel, leaning “over some illustrated magazine” (chapter XXI). From the outset, Orzeszkowa clearly does not want the reader of her novel to decode its meanings unambiguously. When in her mature works she points out the heterogeneity of genres and the difficulty of classification – for example in reference to Justyna from Nad Niemnem – she will use a similar technique of describing an intermediate state (not to say hybrid): “– Neither a bird, nor a mouse… like a bat!”; she makes Benedykt Korczyński, in turn, lose the power of resonance and unambiguity in his Aesopian (perhaps even stuttering phatically) “This… that… of this…”. 

In the novel, the names of places are consistently initialized, as Orzeszka has a habit of doing until the publication of her volume of short stories Z różnych sfer. There are no anagrams here (like the famous Onwil or Ongród), there are only letters signalling affiliation, so the depiction of urban space is subject to the law of complete anonymity and therefore typicality (hence the deliberate stylization of the city to resemble others and the use of the present tense): the city of X., the city of N. located in the W. governorate (“sixty miles from here” – chapter XXIII), and the village of L. (where the healer lives; it could hardly be Ludwinów – a village in Kobryn district, the estate of Piotr Orzeszko; Orzeszkowa probably did not want to clearly point to such a clue). A dozen or so miles from X., “hills beautifully overgrown with pine forest” (chapter V). From X., one can travel to the capital and other European cities, but it’s difficult to say precisely which capital we’re talking about. Probably the capital of the governorate – though not Warsaw, the capital of the Kingdom of Poland, but rather Vilnius (the seat of the governor-general) or Grodno (the seat of the governor). Perhaps St. Petersburg is the most likely location, as the action takes place in lands annexed to Russia, even though Orzeszkowa systematically avoided any Russian themes in her early writing. The topographical realities defined here using periphrasis also indicate that the city lies on a “beautiful and large river” (chapter I), and from the top of the ravine, a row of houses can be seen in the distance. An analogous image to the chasm in the ravine could be the street separating the houses of August (ground floor) and Anastazja (first floor).

Orzeszkowa depicts a city neither beautiful nor ugly (possibly in Lithuania or the Kingdom), intended to resemble many such places, about which the same can be said, i.e. essentially nothing certain. The sidewalks are uneven: “they differ from all other sidewalks in the world in that, in addition to being used for walking, they are also used for jumping, presenting an unfathomable series of hills, valleys, ravines, and streams” (chapter I). It is “a city built on a hill” (chapter V), with visible red roofs and high church spires. It has 30,000 inhabitants, half of whom are Jews, and a significant proportion are Jewish shopkeepers. This refers to the Sabbaths celebrated by the Jewish population, who “illuminate their windows with tallow candles every Friday evening” (chapter I). The movement of property interests and trade is linked to the Jews. The narrator’s references to Jews and their daily practices betray a sense of distance and irony. Jews are only referred to by the term the reader learns from the narrator, but there is no information about the intensity of their activities or the actual movement. The narrative enigmatically speaks of a movement of people, which concerns only an unnamed group. In fact, this movement is completely invisible; we are given a perfunctory, stereotypical statement about the mobility of older brothers in faith. When the character of Josiel is introduced, nothing is said beyond the fact that one of the characters, Jan Rostowiecki (referred to by his wife in French as Jean, which also serves to create distance and incongruity, a feigned social cosmopolitanism and a pseudo-knowledge of the language of sophistication and the code of salon communication), contracts wheat from him. Here, the movement is only mentioned but not seen.

The narrator also points out that there are only several public gardens in the city, and with undisguised irony speaks of their small size: 200 paces long and 100 paces wide. Some paragraphs are sensitive to hearing or sight, but it should be noted that X. is undoubtedly a space of sounds. The city, with its 30,000 inhabitants, is not a metropolis, but if we consider contemporary statistics and guidebooks, as well as later entries in Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego i innych krajów słowiańskich (Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and Other Slavic Countries), it is difficult to unequivocally declare it a provincial town. One could say: neither this nor that – in line with the narrator’s opening words, who declares this because he is empathetic, but also responsible, in his own way “sensitive” (to use Olga Tokarczuk’s words from her Nobel Prize lecture). He’s committed to engaging the reader and keeping them alert. He’s responsible and sensitive, so from the outset he urges them to be cautious and distinguish between what he himself claims and what is revealed in the course of the novel’s plot and the behaviour of the characters (whom he creates, but who cannot be trusted, at least not the vast majority of them). He also demands a close examination of various signs that introduce an inconsistent and ontologically suspect image of the realities that co-create the world of the constructed story. This distrust of the created world and the exposure of its cracks are a testament to Orzeszkowa’s immense ingenuity and responsibility as a writer, perhaps proof that this is a novel composed “with the utmost care.” The final scene is also meant to demonstrate this. The final chapter, set six years later, depicts a completely different setting – a palace representing both paradise and kitsch, presented somewhat like Głębowicze in Trędowata by Mniszkówna forty years later. Surrounding the Gaczycki family’s (Edward and Wanda’s) palace there is a factory, a school, a hospital, a post office, roads, and railways – elements of a thriving society, artifacts and institutions that symbolize order and harmony. But these become suspect signs of permanence and happiness. They undoubtedly are, as dominant features of a social communion of mutual interdependence that benefits the common good, yet this image contradicts the wasted ideals, needs, and creative impulses of the heroine, who is visited by her former everyday companion.

Is it possible to ask sensibly, without overinterpretation, and not contrary to the writer’s intentions, whether Orzeszkowa depicted Grodno or Vilnius in Cnotliwi? Because these two cities would undoubtedly come into play. And even if a clear assignment could be made, would it change the novel’s meanings in any significant way? It seems that both places left their mark on the young writer, so perhaps she tried to come to terms with each of them in her own way (with the glitz and hypocrisy of the environments and individuals living within them – pseudo-elites, pseudo-friends, representatives of the Church, when in 1867–1869, around the time of writing the novel, she tried to annul her marriage to Piotr Orzeszko). And although she stayed in them (Vilnius) or lived in them (Grodno) for shorter or longer periods, by choice or under duress and guardianship, it is difficult to determine which city served as the prototype for the novel’s hidden meanings. Nevertheless, the realities of Cnotliwi are very difficult to locate in the extra-literary world, and thus to assign them with any certainty to temporal, spatial, historical, or cultural context. From the outset, Orzeszkowa consistently aims to mislead the reader by writing about the various dominant features and distinguishing features of urbanity.

Time. The action begins in May (and, interestingly, also ends in May, during an episode six years later) – although the novel contains an anachronism or a lapse in time when, in one sentence, it speaks of a May evening, a warm summer night, and a fire in the fireplace: “Even the fire itself, burning slowly and palely, seemed ashamed of the splendour of the May evening, which was beginning to scatter millions of stars across the sapphire sky and enveloping the city with the warm breath of the descending summer night” (chapter II). May is the opposite of chthonic (in the Northern Hemisphere it is the month of spring) and the beginning of the Eleusinian myth, and thus the moment when the world fully awakens to life (Orzeszkowa will often begin the action of her novels in the warm months). In the Slavic (Polish) tradition, May celebrations harmonize with the tradition of Marian shrine religiosity and the cult associated with the protection of the Mother of God (hence the recitation of the Litany of Loreto and the May devotions appearing in Virtuous Churches, as well as the rosary and scapular brotherhoods). 

The time of action can be relatively determined by a single overt fact: the age of Joanna Starowolska, who is over 60 and an example of a declassed noblewoman, since her impoverishment resulting from past “general misfortunes” is Aesopianly described (chapter IX). Following the conclusions of Piotr Chmielowski, the author of Liberalizm i obskurantyzm na Litwie i Rusi (1898), and bearing in mind what Orzeszkowa herself wrote in her letters Nad Niemnem, one might ask whether the author of Cnotliwi intended to present the 1860s in Lithuanian-Polish territories as a time of prosperity or obscurantism and poverty. Which side did she side with? It seems that the deception, laziness, lack of prospects, and sins against the fundamental virtues of moderation, order, harmony, and concord on the side of the “virtuous” will be overcome by the possibility of self-development, cooperation, and cooperative efforts among various modes of society. The writer draws such an organic order in the finale, but at the cost of personal happiness and unfulfillment, the destruction of Wanda’s and, above all, August’s old dreams.