Evelina's Choice: Conrad in Vologda

THE OPTIONS

Less than a year before the Polish rising of 1863, Evelina and Apollo Korzeniowski were convicted of conspiring against the Russian authorities. On May 8, 1862, escorted by two soldiers, they set out towards Vologda, the place determined for their Russian exile. There, Apollo wrote, "The wind from the White Sea, held up by nothing, brings constant news of polar bears. The population is a nightmare: disease-ridden corpses" (Baines 28). In winter, the temperature can fall as low as minus forty degrees centigrade.

Evelina and Apollo brought with them their only child, the four-year-old Conrad. The prospects for his survival were slim. But for a chance encounter on the way, he would have died of pneumonia even before reaching Vologda. Did Conrad have to share his parents' exile? Were other options open to them?

The relevant Russian penal law¹ had been proclaimed in 1846 by Tsar Nicholas I and remained in force until 1903. Rule 31 states that a wife may voluntarily follow her husband into exile or request a divorce; however, Evelina was convicted in her own right. The second paragraph deals with children born or conceived before the verdict: if they do not go with the condemned to the place of exile, or if they leave it later, then parental rights over them are terminated. In that case a guardian is appointed officially. Inheritance after the decease of the condemned is preserved, as Rule 46 states that the loss of rights and privileges of the condemned does not extend to his wife, or children born or conceived before the verdict, or their descendants.

It seems likely that the drastic rule on terminating parental rights, rather than being merely punitive, aimed at populating remote regions of Russia. In practice, family members were not excluded from guardianship of children left behind. For example: "Maria Kovalevskaya, daughter of the landowner Vorontsov, was sentenced in 1879 to 13 years of katorga followed by lifelong exile in Siberia. Her husband was sent to Minusinsk, while their young daughter Galya remained in Kiev in the care of Kovalevskaya's sister" (Pasko). After Conrad was orphaned in 1869, two years after Apollo was allowed to return to Poland, his maternal grandmother was appointed his guardian.

To keep Conrad safe, Evelina and Apollo would have had to give up their parental rights over him. As a guardian there might have been appointed a family member or a stranger. A present-day perspective on the risk of the latter case may be gained by recalling the Kindertransports of Jewish children to Britain in 1938–39, when thousands of parents gave up their children to unknown carers in a foreign country. Even some eighty years earlier in Poland, the sacrifice of parental rights might not have been regarded as too high a price for a child's best chance of survival. Conrad's parents' choice therefore merits a deeper examination.

THE CHOICE

If a guardian for Conrad was to be appointed by Russian authorities, one of his maternal family members would probably would have been selected, as that family was undoubtedly known to the omnipresent tsarist secret police as politically moderate and opposed to agitation towards an uprising. To Apollo and Evelina, that choice would have meant giving up their parental rights to the very family that had opposed and long delayed their marriage because they judged Apollo to be an ineligible, incompetent fantast. Conrad's parents would thus surrender the only fruit of their union to a family that did not consent to their marriage until Evelina's health was undermined by years of pining for Apollo.

If such personal resentments did not justify hazarding Conrad's survival, there were also nobler considerations. Apollo and Evelina knew well that her sober, moderate family would not bring up Conrad in the fervent patriotism of his parents. Apollo's poem for Conrad's christening includes:

If I should be defiledBy the enemy's favours—Renounce your renegade father [. . .]Baby son, tell yourselfYou are without land, without love,Without country, without people,While Poland—your Mother is in her grave...