Mirrors, Echoes, Dialogues

Agnieszka Bąbel and Agata Grabowska-Kuniczuk

Place and time

In the provincial town of M., situated on a hill above one of “the largest rivers in the country” (Pan Graba, part 1, chapter 2), one can see certain references to the province of Minsk on the Svislach River, with its Golden Hill, where the oldest Catholic parish of the Holy Trinity (St. Roch) was located, as well as a Baroque Dominican monastery from the early 17th century, funded, among others, by contributions from Polish knights returning from a Russian expedition, thanks to whom “a magnificent temple of exquisite brick was built.”^[1] As a result of repression following the 1831 uprising, the monastery was converted into a Catholic seminary, and then into barracks in 1870. The city also had a large Jewish population, constituting two-thirds of the total population in the 1880s.^[2] The codenames appearing in the novel (including the aforementioned city of M., Mrs. G., Marshal B., Governorate N.) can be interpreted as a reference to the 18th-century tradition of replacing surnames and proper names with abbreviations or initials in novels, in order to give the reader the illusion that they refer to real people and places.^[3]

The novel’s action takes place over nearly two years around 1860.^[4] The post-uprising period is evidenced by the appearance of certain elements of Aesopian language, which have no fundamental impact on the course of events, but constitute a feature that complements the characters’ characterizations and enriches the historical background of the presented realities.^[5] Kamilla G. is the daughter of a deceased patriot, whose fate she and her mother recall in a characteristic way. Anna Martuszewska even describes Mr. G. as an insurgent, considering the chronological discrepancies to be deliberate on the author’s part: “the action takes place, admittedly – probably to confuse the censors – when Kamilla is already twenty, but it must fall no later than the year the novel was written, i.e., 1868 […].”^[6]

Wiktor G., whom with all his property “bad people” so cruelly took from his family (Pan Graba, part 1, chapter 2), may not have been an insurgent, but he was certainly sentenced to exile, since his grave is located “somewhere far, far away, in an unknown land, buried under a layer of snow, covered with earth that never thaws” (part 2, chapter 9). The behaviour of Kamilla, raised in reverence to her father’s memory bordering on a cult, is a model of the proper attitude promoted by the committed Polish novel of the 19th century.^[7]

The characteristic language used by the author changes throughout the novel’s subsequent editions. In part 2 of Pan Graba in a conversation between entailer Zrębski, and the jockey Dawid, the aristocrat refers to his social class as “we, the Galicians, who do nothing,” while the Englishman retorts: “Galicia is evidently richer than England, for my lord pays me as much for the upkeep of two horses as if Lord Dudley had paid the overseer of his entire stud farm” (part 2, chapter 2). Such phrases appear in the first press edition from 1869–1870 and persist in the first book edition from 1872, but are ultimately removed in the 1884 version (“we, who do nothing”) or replaced (“Poland is evidently richer than England”). Goods of the entailer were supposed to be located in the province of K., so referring to the Austrian partition during the discussion about the recklessness of Poles in managing their estates would have been a conscious attempt to deceive the censorship – an attempt that was probably successful, since in the subsequent editions, treated by the censors as reprints (and therefore controlled less strictly), the text was changed in accordance with the actual topography and customary nomenclature of the Russian partition.