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Invented Traditions: Primitivist Narrative and Design in the Polish Fin de Siècle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Edward Manouelian
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Extract

Around 1900, Poland saw the outgrowth of a nativist primitivism, one that consciously redefined the periphery as a site of cultural resistance. Primitivism, as Colin Rhodes points out, “does not designate an organized group of artists, or even an identifiable style arising at a particular historical moment, but rather brings together artists’ various reactions to ideas of the primitive.” Within the subject ethnicities of central Europe at the turn of the century, “ideas of the primitive” that were taking shape in the then stillemerging discipline of anthropology were influencing various constructions of national and regional identity. The nationalist imperative of the new discipline was emphasized by Jan Karlowicz, who, writing in 1906, argued that “a people certain of its own existence may calmly study its own folklore from a purely scientific point of view. Tribes deprived of their independence and living in endless fear of suppression and decay, however, must, while reflecting upon the nature and conditions of folkloric tradition, consider practical questions as part of such inquiries. For whenever reference is made to national peculiarities and attributes, there constantly arises the question: to be or not to be.” Karlowicz's remarks point toward a deeply subjective primitivist discourse whose articulations, in critical writing about the applied arts as well as literary representations of rural popular culture, form part of what Eric Hobsbawm terms the “invention of tradition.”

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , Summer 2000 , pp. 391 - 405
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2000

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References

I would like to thank the anonymous Slavic Review referees for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article, as well as Jacqueline Glomski and Anna Barariczak for their patient help with various stages of research that inform it. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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36. Tetmajer, Na Skalnym Podhalu, 122.

37. Karwicka, “The Possibilities of Reconstruction,” 146.

38. Tetmajer, Na Skalnym Podhalu, 120.

39. Ibid., 121.

40. Ibid., 117.

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44. Tetmajer, Na Skalnym Podhalu, 441.

45. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 87.