Since approximately a decade, there has been a certain appetite for postcolonial studies in Poland. Not unlike other influential theoretical schools, we did not have any postcolonial criticism in due time. The idea that we should appeared late, nonetheless some people grasped in obstinately. No wonder that just a few days ago I had to refuse an invitation to participate in a debate around a little essay produced by one of my colleagues; apparently I was the only one to see that the text was woefully obsolete, at the frontier of the ridicule in the author's enthusiasm in discovering things that are very well known indeed, everywhere in the world except Poland.
In some cases the appetite for the postcolonial incited interest in some forgotten figures of Polish explorers that might eventually be seen as Polish colonizers, although working for quite a different empire. Poland was not even an independent state at the time of European colonialism, this is why, strictly speaking, we were out of that game for quite obvious reasons. But somehow, precisely this fact seems to create a need for compensation. This is where the book comes, Wielki gracz (“The great game participant”), by Max Cegielski, a Polish traveller and journalist.
The book is a biography of Bronisław Grąbczewski (1855-1926), an officer in the army of the tsar, traveller and Russian spy in Central Asia. He began his military service in Tashkent, Russian Turkmenistan, in 1876. Later on, he organized expeditions to Kashgaria, Pamir, Afghanistan and Tibet. In an interview, Cegielski confesses that he got the idea of writing about Grąbczewski from a book of Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, on the English-Russian rivalry in Central Asia, that mentions a certain Gromchevsky as a dangerous agent. Quite a novel and picturesque narration, if contrasted with the Polish reputation of Grąbczewski as a geographer, an ethnographer, quite a respectable scientific explorer.
Cegielski's book exploits the unpublished correspondence that Grąbczewski maintained, close to the end of his life, with his former rival, sir Francis Younghusband. Such connections suggest the image of Grąbczewski as a man of the world, quite lost in the new, independent Poland after the WW1, when the Great Game and the empire he served are no more. It is only in 1923 that he starts to publish in Polish, probably forced to do so by increasing financial difficulties. This is when he starts to build his fame as a Polish geographer and scientist, silencing the fact that he might ever have served the Russian empire, much less in the quality of such an important agent as he allegedly was in the 1880s.
Grąbczewski landed in Tashkent at the very moment of an anti-Russian insurrection, that he would never call an insurrection in any of his latter writings – in contrast to other Polish authors, such as Jerzy Rohozinski, would compare these events to their own national insurrections. There is a disparity of narrations, obviously in connection to different causes and attitudes that criss-cross at the same imperial centre. But also, there seems to be a parallel narration serving some sort of myth creation in the margin of the history. What is the truth about Kurmanjan, a legendary female Kirghiz leader that Grąbczewski is supposed to have caught? The Kirghiz claim that she had never been caught at all...
Max Cegielski, Wielki gracz. Ze Żmudzi na Dach Świata, with photographs of Mikołaj Dlugosz, Warszawa, Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2015.
Kraków, 22.04.2019
In some cases the appetite for the postcolonial incited interest in some forgotten figures of Polish explorers that might eventually be seen as Polish colonizers, although working for quite a different empire. Poland was not even an independent state at the time of European colonialism, this is why, strictly speaking, we were out of that game for quite obvious reasons. But somehow, precisely this fact seems to create a need for compensation. This is where the book comes, Wielki gracz (“The great game participant”), by Max Cegielski, a Polish traveller and journalist.
The book is a biography of Bronisław Grąbczewski (1855-1926), an officer in the army of the tsar, traveller and Russian spy in Central Asia. He began his military service in Tashkent, Russian Turkmenistan, in 1876. Later on, he organized expeditions to Kashgaria, Pamir, Afghanistan and Tibet. In an interview, Cegielski confesses that he got the idea of writing about Grąbczewski from a book of Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, on the English-Russian rivalry in Central Asia, that mentions a certain Gromchevsky as a dangerous agent. Quite a novel and picturesque narration, if contrasted with the Polish reputation of Grąbczewski as a geographer, an ethnographer, quite a respectable scientific explorer.
Cegielski's book exploits the unpublished correspondence that Grąbczewski maintained, close to the end of his life, with his former rival, sir Francis Younghusband. Such connections suggest the image of Grąbczewski as a man of the world, quite lost in the new, independent Poland after the WW1, when the Great Game and the empire he served are no more. It is only in 1923 that he starts to publish in Polish, probably forced to do so by increasing financial difficulties. This is when he starts to build his fame as a Polish geographer and scientist, silencing the fact that he might ever have served the Russian empire, much less in the quality of such an important agent as he allegedly was in the 1880s.
Grąbczewski landed in Tashkent at the very moment of an anti-Russian insurrection, that he would never call an insurrection in any of his latter writings – in contrast to other Polish authors, such as Jerzy Rohozinski, would compare these events to their own national insurrections. There is a disparity of narrations, obviously in connection to different causes and attitudes that criss-cross at the same imperial centre. But also, there seems to be a parallel narration serving some sort of myth creation in the margin of the history. What is the truth about Kurmanjan, a legendary female Kirghiz leader that Grąbczewski is supposed to have caught? The Kirghiz claim that she had never been caught at all...
Max Cegielski, Wielki gracz. Ze Żmudzi na Dach Świata, with photographs of Mikołaj Dlugosz, Warszawa, Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2015.
Kraków, 22.04.2019
