Slavdom

Chapter 8

I don’t remember the first time I read the ‘Journey through the Region of the Váh,’ but it certainly was a long time ago. At any rate, when first I did, my eyes passed over the following sentence (in which Ľudovít Štúr records his first impressions of the poet Jan Hollý) without resting upon them for more than the time it took to scan them: ‘The pleasant countenance and grey hair of this old man of fifty-six years lend him an especial charm that enchants the person who gazes upon him.’ But now… those same eyes stopped dead in their tracks. ‘Old man?!… fifty-six!?’ For I passed that milestone two years ago and… Oh well. What’s the use. I’m noting this down here not out of self-pity or vanity or anything of that sort. What really strikes me is how texts change over time, or at least the manner in which we read them does. We have a tendency to accept them, unthinkingly, like monuments carved in stone, as unchanging as the Discobolus, for example. After all, no one imagines that Myron’s athlete will ever complete his motion, fling the discus, and reach for something else, like a javelin or a baseball bat. Literature is the same, in a manner of speaking, of course. The manner in which Dostoevsky spins out Raskolnikov’s thoughts from the time we first meet him until he murders the old pawnbroker is so excruciatingly slow as we pass along Nevsky Prospekt with him — it takes a full 70 pages before the axe finally falls — that we’re almost fooled into hoping that maybe ‘this time’ he’ll turn away from the murder… But we know that this is impossible. Crime and Punishment does not change. But we do; the manner in which we read things changes as we change, due to our life experiences, due to the history that goes on around us, touching upon us, invading our consciousness, to a greater or lesser degree.

Crime and PunishmentA better example of this can be found in the work of one of the great Slavic poets that Štúr mentions from time to time in his writings. In his narrative poem Konrad Wallenrod, which tells the story of a young Lithuanian lad who wishes to deliver his homeland from the invading German Knights of the Cross, the boy receives the following advice from an old bard (which determines his plan of action):

Konrad Wallenrod‘Free knights,’ he said, ‘can choose which arms they please

And on the open field fight man to man.

You’re a slave. Your only weapon’s guile.

Stay on and learn the German arts of war.

First get their trust, then we’ll see what comes next.’

‘What comes next’ is, Konrad passes himself off as one of them, with the premeditated plan of leading them to their destruction.

‘Konrad Wallenrod is one of the most important texts of Polish literature, one written by the greatest authority in nineteenth-century Polish life. Konrad may be a problematic character, but he has never been considered as anything less than a basically positive hero. Given the history of Mickiewicz’s country, which has so often had to face overwhelming odds in its quest to survive, the no-holds-barred approach to national liberation outlined in the old man’s advice — the ‘strategy of the fox’ as opposed to the ‘strategy of the lion’ — has generally been considered admissible given the extenuating circumstances. But now? Can we read these lines the same way after 11 September 2001, the nineteenth anniversary of which passed just six days previous to the date on which I’m writing this? Is it possible to see Konrad Wallenrod (whose name itself is a disguise; he was born Walter Alf) as anything but the violent terrorist of a sleeper cell, whose strings are pulled by a scheming imam? I may be exaggerating here, but it should be obvious, I reckon, that the matter is no longer as straightforward as it used to be. The text is the same, but we have changed.

Konrad WallenrodpositiveMy reception of the works included in this translation has changed too — and that over the course of just a few months. At least half of the translation, with which I am now busied, was completed in the United States, most recently, during the social unrest and ‘calls for justice’ that have roiled American streets during the summer of 2020. Watching the riots unfold, bombarded in a way that we never have been before, thanks to the never-ending ‘news’ programmes and ubiquitous cell-phone film-clips, it is impossible to read the bright shining lines, with which Štúr brings ‘The Contribution of the Slavs to European Civilisation’ to a close without a jaded smirk. ‘Humanity, in its progress, can simply never retrogress.’ Really? Then why have we ‘progressed’ such a very little way in race relations since the 1960s, to say nothing of the 1860s? And on the other hand, is there not at least some naïveté in the convictions of the righteously angry marchers who seem to share Štúr’s positive faith in actually getting something done?

doneIs not the promise of a great and better future nothing more than a political slogan, which reeks with added stench due to the corrupt lips that pronounce it, begging for our votes? If anything, the last four or five years seem to teach us that the idea of slow, but sure, and always incrementally further progress toward an ever better world is a myth. A myth no less fanciful and illusory than Marxist messianism, with its promise of the State eventually withering away as something unnecessary to a newer, progressively more angelic, I suppose, society. Human nature being what it is — and it’s certainly not a very pretty little thing — humanity is not progressing along the straight upward line that optimists like Štúr have in mind, but rather is spinning in a vicious circle. The same old hatreds and problems, the same old brutal solutions in dealing with them, keep coming round and round again — whether it be 1848, 1948, or 2048, ad infinitum. To read Ľudovít Štúr, or any of the innocent nineteenth century nationalists, marching and protesting for justice for their own particular groups ‘justly,’ we must not forget that they were not destined to live through the b****y first half of the twentieth century, when their ontological definitions of nationhood, based on language and — as they would use the term — race, would lead, not to the