Kościuszko i jego następcy [Kościuszko and those who came after]

Abstract

This collection of presentations brings together a dozen papers from two recent conferences of historians held in Poland. Nine are from a meeting in 2016. They focus on aspects of the career of General Tadeusz Kościuszko, the renowned fighter for freedom and social justice, and in anticipation of the 200th anniversary of his death. Three others are from the second conference in 2017; they deal more broadly with topics connected with the struggles for Poland's independence following its destruction in 1795. The full title of this publication is thus more than apt—“Kościuszko and those who came after—the various forms of struggle for Poland and the Polish character from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries.”In all, most of the contributors are from Poland, three from the United States, two from Russia, and one from Ukraine. Generally helpful summaries follow each contribution.The essays on Kościuszko cover a variety of topics of varying significance. James Pula's discussion of Kościuszko's unappreciated but critically important role as an emissary from the United States to France in the late 1790s is especially noteworthy. His service came at a critical moment when the fledgling American republic found itself on the brink of war with the far more powerful French revolutionary regime, a war that America escaped. Anne Gurnack's contribution is to catalogue the monuments to Kościuszko, the justly named “hero of two continents,” primarily the many erected in the United States, and to show how significant a figure he was. Graham Hodges’ work on Kościuszko's dedicated opposition to slavery and social injustice has particular pertinence in the time in which we find ourselves.Among other noteworthy works on Kościuszko in this work are papers dealing with his imprisonment in Russia's capital by Empress Catherine the Great following her crushing of the 1794 insurrection and his meetings with her successor and son, Paul I, by Leonid Wysakowicz and Alla Szelajeva. Another, by Gabriela Majewska, looks at the views of Swedish diplomats in Warsaw at the time of the Kościuszko's insurrection. (They were dubious about its chances; in any case, Sweden was unwilling to become involved on Poland's behalf.) How Kościuszko was portrayed in the pages of a popular Polish youth-oriented magazine is the subject of a piece by Małgorzata Kucharska. Other contributions, by Iwona Janicka, Anna Łysiak-Latkowska, and Witalii Manzurenko, will find interested readers as well.The second set of essays deal with three disparate aspects of Polish independence activities in different times. Krzysztof Lewalski looks at the differing views about independence between two Catholic priests in mid-nineteenth century partitioned Poland. Eugeniusz Koko discusses Józef Piłsudski and his view of the Ukraine. Arnold Kłończyński examines Swedish attitudes toward the Polish émigré communities whose members settled there from the years after World War II to the appearance of the Solidarity movement.This reviewer comes to three conclusions in reading these essays. The first is that these pieces, notwithstanding their uniformly high scholarly quality, are rather disconnected from one another. Secondly, several pieces, most notably those dealing with Kościuszko as an emissary to France, Kościuszko as a true civil rights figure, and Piłsudski and Ukraine, deserve far more attention from both scholars, all too many of whom remain invincibly ignorant about him and Poland's broader historic experience, and interested members of the “attentive public”—in America, Poland, and elsewhere.A third conclusion is that the more one learns about Tadeusz Kościuszko, the more one realizes just how extraordinarily remarkable an individual he was.