The image of the Warsaw Pogrom of 1881 in late nineteenth‐century Polish literature

Abstract

This article interprets how the Christmas 1881 Warsaw Pogrom was depicted in Polish literature, using novels and short stories written soon after this incident as the source. It considers Eliza Orzeszkowa's “O Żydach i kwestii żydowskiej,” written soon after the pogrom, in which she tried to analyse the reasons for what had happened in Warsaw. Other sources it examines are Konopnicka's short story “Mendel Gdański” and Bolesław Prus's Lalka, which is often considered the best Polish novel of the nineteenth century. In analysing these sources, the article considers the varying responses to the pogrom, which was a kind of shock, since Polish liberals considered their part of the tsarist empire exempt from the anti‐Jewish excesses that had occurred in earlier months in southern Russia. However, the outbreak of violence in the Polish capital inevitably meant a closer re‐examination of the Polish context and its often complex Jewish–gentile relationship.