Between Dublin and Siberia: Poland in the Nation Newspaper, 1846
Jan Jędrzejewski
Ulster University
Abstract
It has for a long time been something of a critical commonplace among cultural historians and literary scholars alike to see Ireland and Poland as sister nations which, albeit geographically distant, have over the centuries followed similar historical and political trajectories, developed similar patterns of social and cultural life, and generated similar types of mentality. The popular stereotypes of a typical Irishman and a typical Pole – sociable, passionate, generous, patriotic, but at the same time irrational, dogmatic, intolerant, and obsessively preoccupied with ideologies of the past at the expense of pragmatically engaging with the realities of the present – are of course only partly accurate; in fact, it could well be argued that the perception of Poland as the Central-Eastern European equivalent of Ireland, a fervently Catholic nation which clung, during long years of political and cultural oppression, to its faith and its culture in an attempt to preserve its sense of national identity and pride, to eventually emerge, after the First World War, as an independent nation liberating itself from the political dominance of its powerful yet somehow morally inferior eastern neighbour, offers a rather simplistic and superficial interpretation of a much more complex set of historical, sociological, and cultural comparisons that could be made between those two nations.
And yet there were indeed moments in Irish and Polish history, not least during the nineteenth century, when some straightforward historical analogies could indeed justifiably be made, and when the problems facing Irish and Polish societies, the concerns of the Irish and Polish public opinion, and the themes and ideas explored by Irish and Polish thinkers and artists followed similar lines, and possibly – as it is the intention of this paper to demonstrate – influenced each other in a dynamic and creative way.