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PARTISAN REVIEW
THE MAKING OF POLAND
THE STRUGGLES FOR POLAND. By Neal Ascherson. Random
House. $19.95 .
THE POLISH WAY. A THOUSAND-YEAR HISTORY OF THE
POLES AND THEIR CULTURE. By Adam Zamoyski. Franklin Watts.
$24.95.
In 1645, throngs of excited spectators filled the streets of
Paris to watch the arrival of an enormous cavalcade - the Polish em–
bassy with the magnate Rafal' Leszczynski at its head. The splendid
Arabian horses dazzled the eye: they were not only decked out in silk
and velvet caparisons embroidered with pearls and precious stones
but also, for this occasion, had been dyed in various colors. Most of
them were deliberately loosely shod, so that now and again a
horseshoe would come off as a gift for the Parisian folk. This was not
a shabby gift at all: the horseshoes were made of solid gold.
In 1831, Paris welcomed another stream of Polish visitors . This
time it was not an embassy from an independent country, and the
procession, although greeted warmly, was far from triumphant.
Thousands of survivors of the failed insurrection against czarist
Russia entered France in that year and settled there to form the so–
called Great Emigration. Their own country had been erased from
the political map of Europe thirty-six years earlier and was not to
reemerge for the next eighty-seven years.
Today, in the streets of Paris (as well as London or New York)
again the sounds of the Polish language can be heard. And again
people who speak it are most likely to be recent emigres, driven out
of their country by political persecution or economic misery .
If
they
are just tourists , they come not on thoroughbreds, of course, but in
rattling Polish Fiats . Instead of gold horseshoes, they litter streets
with the empty cans in which they brought their food in order to save
on hard currency.
This is how the West usually sees the Poles. Their thousand–
year-long history presents itself to Western eyes as a history of
failure. Adam Zamoyski, who in his immensely readable book
recalls the 1645 episode, is quick to point out that the ostentatious
splendor of Polish diplomatic missions at that time was misleading:
such window dressing obscured the intrinsic weaknesses of the
Polish political system and distorted the economic realities. More-
