“Dear Father!”: A Collection of B. Piłsudski’s Letters, et alii ed. by Koichi Inoue (review)

583 Ab Imperio, 1/2003 Tomasz KAMUSELLA Koichi Inoue (Ed.), “Dear Father!”: A Collection of B. Piłsudski’s Letters , et alii, Ser.: Pilsudskiana de Sapporo, no. 1 (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 1999), 155 p., figures, facsimiles. Bronisław Piłsudski (1866-1918) is an elusive figure. He pales, unjustifiably , in the looming shadow of his one-year-junior brother Józef, who passed into history as the creator and the long-serving Leader (Naczelnik) of the Polish nation-state. Bronisław Piłsudski was born into a Polishspeaking Lithuanian family of the nobility. At that time, his native land had been part of the Russian empire for almost a century, from the time of the partitions of PolandLithuania . His youth was typical. A Swiss governess gave him a good command of French and German, and he finished Russian-language primary and secondary education. His and Józef’s flirtation with Polish nationalism and socialism started in gymnasium, as was the case of other noble children gradually turned intelligentsia . Bronisław enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the Imperial University, St. Petersburg in 1886. Due to his ideological activities, he and Józef unwittingly and indirectly (it seems) became involved in the unsuccessful plot aimed at the assassination of Tsar Alexander III. In 1887 he was sentenced to a fifteenyear katorga (exile) on the prison island of Sakhalin, and Józef was exiled to Eastern Siberia until 1892. The twelve letters of Bronisław included in this volume, letters discovered in the Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, Vilnius, are addressed to his father, sister and brothers. The majority of them span the period 1887-89. In his letters, Bronisław traces his progress from St. Petersburg to Sakhalin via Odessa, the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and Singapore, as well as his first three years in exile. Bronisław’s initial grief gives way to apologies to his father for not having followed his advice to steer clear out of conspiratorial work. Bronisław strives to understand his fate in the light of Christian thought but he soon remembers the concept of noblesse oblige. This dictum of the nobility, reformulated on the basis of Comte’s philosophy of positivism, meant for Polish-language intelligentsia and nobility the need to work rather than fighting for would-be independent Poland. Espousing this ethos, Bronisław endeavored first of all to not be lazy. During the oceanic transit to the island of his exile, he taught a young sailor how to read, and also conducted weather observations. In his letters, Bronisław at first addressed his father with the respectful Вы. But the farther he went he more he used the more direct and familiar 584 Рецензии/Reviews Ты. Thousands of kilometers away, he desperately tried to keep up with the life of his family. He described the minutiae of his life to them and attempted to inculcate his ‘lazy’ brothers with positivism. He agonized most of all from not knowing anything of Józef, not even his address. When Bronisław finally obtained information on the whereabouts of his beloved brother, they started exchanging letters. Unfortunately, these letters may have not yet been discovered, as they were not included in this publication , unlike letters from Bronisław’s other relatives. During his exile, Bronisław wished to broaden his education and to remain useful to society. His father sent him books on astronomy, physics, biology, medicine and mathematics, more than he had even asked for, and Bronisław began to teach children of ex-inmates, also engaging in the agriculture of his penal village, in clerical work at the prison office, and in the running of the meteorological station. This information, which is not found in the letters, is provided by Inoue in his three papers, also included in the volume. Two of these papers were presented at the two international symposia devoted to B. Piłsudski and his ethnological research held at Sapporo and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in 1985 and 1991 respectively. The third paper was delivered by Inoue in 1997 at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. In 1891, Bronisław met fellow state criminal Lev Yakovlevich Sternberg...