Page 56 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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empire. As such, late nineteenth-century tensions between the landowners’ more pragmatic
approach to imperialism and the anti-imperial nation-building mission of the leftist intelligentsia

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assumed a new immediacy as state borders took shape.
The competition between Volhynia’s Polish landowners and the Polish activists associated

with the Guard came down to the question of how far the locus of political power would shift at the

level of the village. In what ways, people asked, would the new configuration of east European

sovereignty—a global issue—change what Polish civilization came to mean across the contested

borderlands? After all, civilization meant something very different to the landowners of Volhynia

than it did to the democratizing outsiders who filled the ranks of the Guard. During the prewar

period, local landowners had created a system of social and economic relationships between the

manor house (dwór) and the surrounding, mainly Orthodox, Slavic population, one that relied on a

vision of Polish civilizational superiority, rather than political equality. When they subsequently

recalled this world, they depicted the manor house as a haven of Polish civilization and good

manners in the countryside, nostalgically celebrating what they saw as the perennial and organic

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nature of the landowners’ privileges.

At the end of the war, Polish landowners began to recognize that ideas about what

civilization might mean were changing—and they tried to get in step with the new global moment. In

local proclamations, they spoke about their role as “the mainstay of Polishness” who completely

subordinated class concerns “to the general interest of the whole population” and denied any claims

61 On the landowners’ loss of Polish national consciousness, see “Memoriał w sprawie położenia na Wołyniu,” 89.
62 Zarycki, Ideologies of Eastness, 145.
63 In a memoir about her experiences in a landowning family in the eastern part of Volhynia that was to become part
of the Soviet Union after the First World War, Zofia Kossak painted a typically nostalgic vision of ethnic harmony,
based on the peasants’ acceptance of the superiority of the lords of the manor (pany in local dialects), rather than on
social and political equality. Zofia Kossak, Pożoga (Warsaw, 1935), 9. An analysis of Kossak’s paternalistic style
can be found in Hanna Gosk, “Polski dyskurs kresowy w niefikcjonalnych zapisach międzywojennych. Próba
lektury w perspektywie postcolonial studies,” Teksty Drugie 6 (2008), particularly 24-25.

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