Page 20 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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foreign bodies, parasites, and a cancer within the nation. Other studies, however, have focused on
the more “inclusionary” approach to Poland’s national minorities after Piłsudski’s coup d’état in

1926, particularly that espoused by Volhynia’s longest serving interwar governor, Henryk Józewski

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(1928-38). The historian Timothy Snyder, who introduced Józewski to an English-speaking
audience, presented this playwright, artist, and politician as something of a heroic intellectual holdout

against the tide of exclusionary nationalism and anti-Semitism that was sweeping Poland. The

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governor, Snyder argues, represented nothing less than “multiculturalism avant la lettre.”
Works of intellectual history have begun to move beyond this bifurcation, showing instead

that inclusion and exclusion were not absolute terms but that there was significant ideological and

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practical overlap between the two “camps” as they constructed ideas of the nation. Paul
Brykczynski’s recent book, in which he painstakingly interrogates the discursive framework of the

1922 assassination of Poland’s first president Gabriel Narutowicz, for instance, shows how the idea

that Jews were not “true Poles” moved into the mainstream of political discourse and was not merely

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the preserve of the National Democrats. And yet, since the vast majority of Polish citizens between
the wars did not live in the state’s capital (less than 4% in fact) and since concepts of the nation are

not merely formed in urban intellectual and political milieus and then distributed to other areas, it is

just as important to trace how our second-tier actors translated and adapted ideas into locales far

26 Joanna Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jews from 1880 to the Present (Lincoln and
London, 2006); Malgorzata Domagalska, “Anti-Semitic discourse in Polish nationalistic weeklies between 1918-
1939,” East European Jewish Affairs 36, no 2 (2006): 191-197.
27 Jan Kęsik, Zaufany komendanta: Biografia polityczna Jana Henryka Józewskiego 1892-1981 (Wrocław, 1995);
Helena Wiórkiewicz, Henryk Jan Józewski: polityk, artytsta malarz: katalog wystawy (Warsaw, 2002).
28 Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven,
2005), xiv.
29 Brian Porter has shown that these two positions had entangled intellectual origins. Porter, When Nationalism
Began to Hate.
30 Paul Brykczynski, Primed for Violence: Murder, Antisemitism, and Democratic Politics in Interwar Poland
(Madison, 2016).

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