Page 127 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

figures whose job it was to master the physical and human environments in which they found

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themselves. Newspaper articles drew on motifs of adventure that were not simply limited to Poland,

as was the case in the aforementioned article in the Lublin-Kresy Review. Here, the author compared

the eastern borderlands with the American frontier, highlighting similarities between tales of the

rapid building work completed by KOP and “the extraordinary stories from the lives of the first

pioneers of American settlements, the stories of Jack London about the dangerous expeditions to

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Klondike, [and] incredible tales of the fearless trappers and hunters.” If it was a place in which a
man could embrace danger and impose his will on a wild landscape, the eastern borderlands were

also seen as one in which the identities of local people seemed less important. And yet, the metaphor

did not entirely work. Unlike people of European origin in what they saw as the empty territories of

the American West, KOP’s soldiers depicted themselves as reclaiming a land that bore the historical

footprint of an older Polish state. Put another way, their national task was not to civilize what Joseph

Conrad—another Pole from the eastern borderlands—had called the “blank spaces on the map” of

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the world, but rather to re-civilize an inherently Polish region after a long imperial hiatus.
While KOP drew on a rich vein of Polish national mythology by promoting the role of its

soldiers as latter-day knights, it had to navigate the classic civilizer’s dilemma between inserting

these people into local communities and resisting the potential threat posed by human and physical

environments in the east. After all, since the majority of KOP outposts were situated in small rural

settlements that were often far from the nearest transportation route or train station, these men

frequently represented one of the only points of contact between the state and borderland inhabitants,

88 The image of the KOP border guard in Poland might be compared with that of the Soviet border guard in the
Soviet Union. See Chandler, Institutions of Isolation, 78-79; Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual
(Chicago, 1985), 114.
89 “Budowy Strażnic Kresowych,” 5.
90 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London, 2007), 8.

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