What Discoveries await in the Provinces? Or: A rather unusual thesis novel

Aneta Mazur

Provincial realities

Orzeszkowa’s oeuvre earned her the title of “epic storyteller of the provinces,”^[1] although it would be fair to argue that her early novel, bearing the term provinces in its title, contributed little to this achievement. None of the contemporary reviewers was particularly taken by the “formal” images “lacking in life and colour”^[2] of the stereotypically familiar tropes of inter-uprising-era literature (country houses, estates, taverns, and rural and small-town protagonists). From today’s perspective, it is even more difficult to appreciate this schematic and conventional setting, deprived as it is of any notable points of interest as far as depictions of the landscape, ethnography or the borderland region are concerned – everything that made the later Orzeszkowa such an admired writer. The local flavour in Na prowincji is limited to onomastics: the River Niemen, the Polesie region, the Kowno region, and the Kobryń region, the latter hidden behind the codename of “the district of K.”, alongside the use of the authentic placename Adampol^[3]. The small town X. and the regional centres K. and N. remain anonymous, while the toponyms of Piaseczna, Pszeniczna and Topolin, the latter, to a lesser extent, derived from the name of the river Niemenka, seem to be literary inventions. We most probably find ourselves in the author’s home region, along the banks of the Niemen, while the vast, flat landscape prominent in the second part of the novel seems to evoke the southern stretches of the Grodno region, which lie closer to the Lithuanian part of Polesie^[4]. The local Belarusian villages are hidden somewhere over the horizon in the novel; the favourite servant is merely the creation of a cunning commoner, while the local mołodyce (young girls) are mentioned just once. The spatial and class-based imprecision is accompanied by the blurred chronology of the plot^[5]. There are sporadic allusions to the period following the January Uprising (for example, social life lacking in men), but the customs, specific cultural events and economic circumstances (an estate with “huts” for sale, ending serfdom as a private initiative), suggests that the six-year span of the plot takes place most probably in the late 1850s or the beginning of the 1860s.^[6] It cannot be ruled out, of course, that the enigmatic chronotope of Orzeszkowa’s novel was at the time read through a now illegible plot key^[7]. Perhaps it was in the region around Ludwinów or Milkowszyna that dramatic fate of the real-life prototype of Wincunia played out.

Overall, the image of the region cannot compare to the wonderful portrait of landscapes, ethnography, customs, and society in the Niemen region that Orzeszkowa presented in her early journalistic writings. Likewise, Na prowincji does not bear any traces of the decline of the landowning status quo and the inevitable transformations of the modus vivendi that she depicted as a conscientious chronicler of the 1850s: “larger and smaller-scale bankruptcies, partial and complete ones, have started to spread in a truly alarming fashion.”^[8] The provinces of Orzeszkowa’s novels differ from Balzac’s provinces, with comparisons of the two common in analyses of the Polish author.^[9] Following Jerzy Tynecki’s rather apt phrase, what she depicts is a world “polished with a veneer of outmodedness.”^[10] It is also an ambivalent world, constructed along clear black-and-white lines, as if Orzeszkowa wanted to depict the two faces of the peripheries, using the Janus-faced model familiar in her journalistic pieces of the time.^[11]

On the one hand, the provinces exert a destructive force due to the socio-political conditions of the time (something passed over owing to censorship), the realities dictated by class-based prejudices, and universal human failings and weaknesses. Writing to the Warsaw-based Józef Sikorski in 1868, Orzeszkowa declared:

You, Sir, are unfamiliar with provincial life in villages and small towns, you don’t know how people there live and sin, how painfully they waste their lives in idleness and vice; but I am aware of all this […] and sometimes I shed bloody, internal tears for them because I would like for them to be different.^[12]

The social marketplace of vanity and morbid ambitions plays a central role in these vices. This is revealed most critically in the biography of young Snopiński, something that is condemned in, among other places, Count Kalikst’s extensive peroration. The novel’s approving stance towards maintaining distance between classes is not an expression of conservativism, which was something that Marxist criticism has accused Orzeszkowa of, but rather a defence of a hierarchy based on authentic values that entails the separation of the riffraff from valuable individuals (“poorer individuals deserving of respect do not often visit the salons because they don’t have the time,” part 2, chapter VII). The genuine elites (the countess) are not against fraternizing with talented representatives of lower classes, yet the degenerate salons (Karliczowa) maintain toxic relations with spongers, whom they support to their own detriment and to the detriment of the spongers. Beyond the dramatic stories of the leading protagonists that result from their provincial wastefulness, we occasionally gain insight into other, less harmful but no less troubling cases of “the pettiness, pretentiousness, and intolerance”^[13] typical of particular micro-milieux (gossipy “parish announcements”). To what extent can this negative image be considered a reflection of life in the Lithuanian provinces more generally, as a space that is seen as a “marginalized space, a run-down corner,” thus lagging behind the idealized capital of the Kingdom?^[14] It would be fair to suspect that the complexes and prejudices of a “provincial woman”^[15] from Grodno were accumulated in Orzeszkowa’s third novel.

On the other hand, Na prowincji depicts everything that Orzeszkowa herself sought to find in the region: the potential of talented, energetic people and the unlimited potential of “an effective cell that contributes to the broader social organism”.^[16] Barbara Noworolska’s interesting hypothesis leads us to see in the novel and in its title an illustration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea outlined in Emile, namely: “To study the genius and character of a nation you should go to the more remote provinces,” since it is “[i]n these remoter provinces a nation assumes its true character and shows what it really is.”^[17] The Polish novelist follows this argument to reveal potential that is programmed, Noworolska states, according to the “Franklinian principle of social utility.”^[18] Indeed, it should not be overlooked that Orzeszkowa encountered certain positive models up close in the 1860s.

As with the still rare but nevertheless emergent attempts to conduct agricultural reforms and improvements here and there, producing the first steps towards improving local culture, lifting farming […], the kernel of future development can likewise be found in seemingly futile, occasionally philanthropic efforts.^[19]

This is why the depiction of the provinces here can still be considered less fraught than in other early works by Orzeszkowa. Even if the provinces do resemble a cage, it is at least one where a generally decent existence can be secured. The model protagonist Bolesław Topolski remains at home, making the most of rural pleasure while proving capable of implementing agricultural and industrial innovation at the same time as he acquires the refinement of a metropolitan man who is up-to-date on the latest cultural developments. Of course, this proves possible because he in fact possesses the magical capabilities that he is ironically accused of having by another protagonist. He thus resides in the utopian dimension of this thesis novel.

It could thus be argued that the eclectic dimension of the provinces in Orzeszkowa’s writing combines two different projects: a centralizing one typical of Positivists, who ascribed an educational role to the centre in relation to the peripheries and a polycentric one, according to which progress occurs on the basis of local values and traditions.^[20]