Seeing Japan, Imagining Poland: Polish Art and the Russo‐Japanese War

Abstract

On first inspection it seems unlikely that interests of Polish artists and writers in Japan at beginning of twentieth century?the theme of this essay?could be anything more than subject of a minor footnote in history of either country. Living as subjects of three aggressive empires that had partitioned nation over a century earlier, Polish intelligentsia was remarkably introspective. The widespread desire for national independence from Russian, German, and Austrian rule overshadowed most aspects of national culture. Art and literature in late nineteenth century were weighed on Polish scales: a poem or a painting was most highly valued if it captured national hopes or anguish. Patriotic writers and painters were claimed as authentic voice of a nation silenced by injustice.1 Polonocentrism was not, of course, limited to art: historians raked over past events in order to find explanations of misfortunes endured in present.2 National messianists, sharing a vision shaped by poet Adam Mickiewicz in mid century, claimed that wrongs done to nation would eventually be corrected by natural laws of justice and that Poland, like Christ, would arise again. Others saw causes for loss of sovereignty in terms of national failings; not least in anarchic system of government known as golden freedom (zlota wolnoic) which had operated during sixteenth and seventeenth-century Commonwealth. The Poles could not, however, be accused of ignorance or indifference to present events abroad. Contemporary political dramas in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna, or elsewhere on international stage were invariably weighed up in terms of their impact on the Polish question. From Polish perspective, Russia's war with Japan in 1904-5 and turmoil which followed it throughout Vistula Country (Privislinskii Krai / Kraj PrzywiSlahski), as Russian Poland was known, was perhaps