16
PARTISAN REVIEW
in Hungary, in Bohemia, but also in Russia. After all, there are parallels
between national bards who appeared at that time and whom we can
call
linguistic
heroes, such as Mickiewicz, Petofi, and Pushkin. Somebody
once said that Poland, after it disappeared from the map of Europe at the
end of the eighteenth century, was invented anew by a few poets.
Let us consider the enormous role of literature in the development
of the so-called national consciousness. Its dominance confirms the thesis
that nationalism is closely related to the existence of schools in which the
young are submitted to a special indoctrination based upon the texts of
venerated great writers, harbingers of a certain highly emotional tradi–
tion. This applied
to
the countries aspiring to independence but also to
their oppressors. For instance, Russian schools in Russian-occupied
Poland of the nineteenth century used the great Russian writers -
Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev - as a mainstay in their program of Russifica–
tion. In view of the role of written culture, we may observe the conse–
quences of its triumph in the twentieth century. A hundred years ago na–
tional literatures were largely beyond the reach of the lower classes,
while today every child learns about the luminaries of his or her country,
and this adds considerably to the intensity of national feeling. There
would be nothing incongruous in imagining an atomic submarine named
Dostoevsky
or an aircraft named
Pushkin .
In Poland a ship was named after
a modern bard, the poet Galczynski. It is true that this is a ship of the
merchant marine.
We may wonder at the chance of success of Basque, Flemish, or
Catalan nationalism in Western Europe . These are belated arrivals, and
they pay the price of being late in their rebellion against the written cul–
ture of French or Spanish . One at least potential national movement has
no chance whatever, and that is the attempt to recreate Occitania;
namely, the area of the Languedoc covering the entire south of present–
day France. The population there until recently spoke Oc, which was
considered a dialect by Frenchmen. The fact that it was the language of
a sophisticated written culture in the Middle Ages didn't save it from
disappearance, and the few intellectuals writing novels in it are not
enough to restore its usage.
In our part of Europe we see some phenomena analogous to those
of Western Europe, but on a larger scale. While the written culture in
the Baltic languages benefits from the non-Slavic character of those lan–
guages, the situation is much less clear in the areas where millions speak a
Slavic language at home - Belorussian or Ukrainian - as opposed to the
predominantly Russian school and written Russian culture. In France,
parents of Breton children do not want to send their children to school
taught in Breton, though those schools are available. And they are
motivated by obvious practical reasons. It is an open question whether
