When it became possible to write about a thousand years of “Polish history” in 1966—a millennium after the baptism of Mieszko, the country's first historic ruler, into the Roman Church—there were very few historical surveys of Poland available in English. Norman Davies, the British historian and author of God's Playground: A History of Poland (1981), noted in the preface to that work that it was “one of the very few products of its kind since Professor [William R.] Morfill's pioneering effort [i.e.,The Story of Poland] in 1893” (xi). Davies wrote and published Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (1984)—alternatively subtitled The Past in Poland's Present—over the next several years amid the rise and repression of the Solidarity movement. Three years after that, the Polish-British historian Adam Zamoyski published The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History of the Poles and Their Culture (1987). A handful of attempts to cover the gamut of Polish history have been attempted since then, in more or less concise fashion: Mieczysław Biskupski, The History of Poland (2000); Jerzy Lukowski and Herbert Zawadzki, Poland: A Concise History (2001); Anita Prażmowska, A History of Poland (2004); and Zamoyski's Poland: A History (2009), a revised and updated version of his earlier work. Patrice Dabrowski cites all of the above in the “General Works” section of her bibliography.
Why write “yet another” thousand-year history, to quote one recent reviewer of Dabrowski's book? In short, because there is a need for such books. This need stems from an underlying fact: “In most tellings of European history, one is lucky to hear Poland mentioned at all” (xii). Among Western observers, Poland continues to be seen as a strange and remote place, almost a nonentity: a “country in the moon,” as Edmund Burke remarked in 1795; a “yawning chasm whose edges are obscured by an overhang of accepted commonplaces,” as Zamoyski put it in 1987 (4); a metaphorical “nowhere” (Dabrowski, xi). After partitioning Poland off the map of Europe in 1772, 1793, and 1795, the crowned heads of Russia, Prussia, and Austria secretly agreed to “abolish everything which could revive the memory of the existence of the Kingdom of Poland” (Dabrowski, 288). Polish history thus became “an early casualty of political propaganda” (Zamoyski, 5). By writing Poland back into the European narrative, popular histories like Poland: The First Thousand Years redress a deep-seated ignorance of Polish history beyond Central Europe, certainly in the United States.
Dabrowski, like Zamoyski, rejects the idea that Poles are an inherently tragic nation “condemned by geography and their own ineptitude to be the victims of history”—and yet she clearly portrays them as such at certain points in her narrative (Dabrowski, xiv; Zamoyski, 4). She also mentions “fate” or “destiny” at least four dozen times. This is probably where she comes closest to Davies. The author of God's Playground expounded a decidedly holistic view of Polish history when he wrote that “the role of arbitrary external influences and of foreign powers has been no less important than that of coherent domestic forces” (ix)—a view that finds its consummate expression in the title of his book. Dabrowski invokes Davies (but not by name) to contrast his geographical—one might even say historiosophical—metaphor of Poland as a “heart of Europe” with the directional metaphor of a “crossroads” (Dabrowski, xi–xii). Both imply a blessing and a curse: an ability, in good times, to profit from exposure to “ideas emanating from many directions” (xii), and a liability, in moments of crisis, to become “an international barracks” (244).
The book is divided into thirteen chapters grouped into four parts. Part one is divided into four chapters resonant with the “crossroads” metaphor: “Connecting with the West” (prehistory–1364), “Embracing the East” (1370–1413), “Spreading Southward” (1434–1572), and “Crafting a Center” (1548–72). Part two is divided into three chapters, subtitled “Sarmatia Ascendant” (1573–1610), “Sarmatia Besieged” (1586–1683), and “Sarmatia Transformed” (1697–1791). Part three is divided into three chapters on the partitions (1791–1809), the Polish uprisings (1812–63), and nation-building (1840s–1904). Part four is divided into chapters on the Second Republic (1901–39), World War II (1939–45), and the Communist era (1945–89). The epilogue surveys developments in Polish history since 1989.
Dabrowski accentuates the Sarmatian theme in Polish history well, shedding a critical light on the mercurial quintessence of “Polishness” over time. She explains how, around the middle of the sixteenth century, a mythic national genealogy took hold among the Commonwealth's populous, ethnically and religiously diverse nobility that posited a common descent from the Sarmatians, a real, historical warrior people living on the Black Sea Steppe in the third century (134). This mythical genealogy was “a tremendously useful fiction” that provided nobles and anyone else who bought into it with “a sense of overall unity, purpose, even mission” (134). While Sarmatian belief blossomed as a creative, unifying myth, it ossified as a parochial, dogmatic, reactionary ideology that crippled internal efforts to reform the state and deal effectively with external threats in the eighteenth century (246).
The only truly regrettable thing about Poland: The First Thousand Years is its lack of footnotes or endnotes. Dabrowski lists no Polish-language sources in her bibliography, but has displayed her mastery of these elsewhere, in Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland (2004). Her newest book is based entirely on Anglophone, academic historiography of Poland, the vast majority of it published within the last forty years. Synthesizing this material into an engaging, thousand-year narrative history that integrates political, cultural, social, and economic factors in a balanced fashion is an admirable—one might even say historical—achievement.
