Heartache, homeland, passion, obsession, fantasy: the idea of Galicia, Larry Wolff explains in this beautifully evocative study of the erstwhile Habsburg province, has followed an impressive trajectory. What was once, in the late eighteenth century, a painful reminder of Poland's partition became, by the 1930s, its own lost homeland to be remembered, cursed, mourned, and recreated using some of the same tools marshaled to create it in the first place: literature and history—but this time with memory in place of political fiat.
The author's voice is musical; the entire method of composition suggests sonata form: exposition, development, recapitulation. In this manner, recurring references to central themes, personages, and events are not repetitive, but pedagogically effective. By the end of the work, Wolff has constructed, rather than merely referenced, a Galician canon—a key set of moments, places, names, and ideas that anyone who wishes to understand the province must know and, thanks to the text, will know.
Wolff begins with the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, which occasioned the creation of a new Austrian province with a Latinized version of an old, Rus name: the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. Although “Galicia was neither a blank slate nor a new world” (p. 17), the idea of Galicia was new; the pages of its provincial history books blank; its borders no more artificial than any political boundaries, but much more obviously so; its population divided by religion, language, custom, wealth, and privilege. Would this new province come to be accepted—within its own borders, throughout the empire, and in the rest of Europe—as legitimate?
Habsburg administrators, led by the bureaucrat-in-chief, Joseph II, himself, immediately began bringing what they thought was Enlightenment to a land they considered utterly benighted, troubled, strange, and savage. But the process of collecting and classifying—natural resources, insects, fauna, flora, and even (or especially) human beings—was not only a) typically enlightened and b) gently imperialist, but also c) fundamentally constitutive of Galicia itself. To list the native plants of Galicia, as Wilibald von Besser did in 1809, was not only to make the province “known” to the scientific community and to centralizing administrators in Vienna, but also to assert that there was such a thing as a “Galician” plant, and hence such a thing as “Galicia.” When Wolff wryly suggests that “counting cows was, in some sense, the prescribed Galician antidote for the Polish national fever” (p. 68), it is not only because counting cows kept one busy, but because it helped to create the very sort of provincial coherence that could make Polish patriotism compatible with Habsburg loyalty.
After a few decades of unpredictability in which Galicia first expanded to include “Western Galicia” and then contracted to make room for Napoleon's ambition, Galicia's permanent attachment to Austria seemed assured. (Only the posthumous publication of Metternich's memoirs in 1880 revealed how little committed the chancellor was to the province.) Metternich believed that turning rebellious Poles into obedient Germans was not critical to maintaining peace in, and possession of, Galicia: turning its residents into “Galicians” would suffice. This insight is at the heart of the idea of Galicia. Neither a national category nor an empty one, “Galicia” was granted privileges that allowed a sense of provincial integrity apart from the empire at large. It offered the possibility of maintaining an enabling loyalty to the emperor in Vienna, without conceding that “Poland” had lost its meaning.
The climax of the book, and of Galicia's troubled history, is the 1846 jacquerie in which peasants responded to news of an incipient rebellion planned in Paris by Polish émigrés and launched from the neutral Free City of Cracow. Instead of rising up as Poles to join a revolution that might recreate an independent Poland, Galician peasants rose up as laborers to slaughter their landlords. Were they giving their tyrannical overlords their just deserts after centuries of abusive peonage? Or were they incited to rise up and subsequently rewarded for the massacre by cynical Habsburg administrators? This dreadful incident (“the insurgents lay upon miserable little carts, the blood ran down from the straw, and the dogs licked it up,” noted Leopold von Sacher-Masoch [p. 143]) was the culmination of decades of debate about the relationship between peasants and landlords in Galicia. Was it slavery? Was it paternalistic care? Did the Austrians improve the peasants’ lot with gradual emancipation? Or undermine the core of a centuries-long successful cooperation between noble and serf?
But the jacquerie also marked the beginning of decades of uncertainty about the limits of the Polish nation and the viability of insurrectionary nationalism. Its shadow hung over the three great questions that preoccupied Galicia from mid-century until its abrogation: how to remain faithful to the future potential of recreating an independent Polish state while maintaining all the advantages (including substantial political autonomy) of a cooperative relationship with Vienna; how to maintain the class privilege of the landholding nobility without risking a violent uprising; to what extent Jews and Ruthenians should be integrated into the Polish nation. Antisemitism in the press and on the streets, anti-Ukrainian bullying at the pollbooths, sensational murders: the idea of Galicia survived even the descent of Galicians into the kind of violence that amounted to a sort of cold civil war. As Galicia's story turns from the tension of the nineteenth century to the horrors of the twentieth, Wolff, like Isaac Babel, whom he seems greatly to admire, tells it with a “rich reserve of human sympathy” (p. 382).
Wolff's virtuosic performance leaves this reader with the occasional feeling of observing the kind of sophisticated parlor game that could only be played in the salons of enlightened Europe: who can find a connection between this comedy by Fredro and that essay competition on improving the fertility of Galician soil? Wolff can find in any text—whether dramatic, scientific, autobiographical, political, or even descriptions of interior décor—the sought-after motif: all relate to the idea of Galicia. This makes the book not only instructive in its historical analysis, but also dazzling in its intellectual creativity.
