The Coming Spring

Introduction

vii Introduction he Coming Spring was Stefan Żeromski’s last novel. Finished in September 1924, it was published in the last days of that year (with a 1925 publication date); Żeromski died on November 20, 1925. For most of his life Żeromski had been engaged in the cause of Polish independence and in issues of social justice. He was born in 1864 near Kielce in what is now central Poland and then was in the Russian-occupied partition of the country. His birth during the final throes of the failed January Uprising (1863–64) against the Russians has led to his being dubbed “the posthumous child” of that uprising. He devoted his first novels, The Labors of Sisyphus (Syzyfowe prace, 1897) and The Homeless (Ludzie bezdomni, 1900), to social issues such as poverty and to the political struggle for independence under the oppressive rule of the Russian Empire. The heroes and heroines of his novels and stories were often social activists. Subsequent historical novels such as Ashes (Popioły, 1904) and The Faithful River (Wierna rzeka, 1912) offered patriotic yet far from uncritical accounts of crucial moments in Polish history. Independence for Poland finally came in 1919, in the aftermath of World War I. The very model of a comT The Coming Spring viii mitted public intellectual, Żeromski plunged himself into journalistic activity and into work for the newly independent country. By this time he was a nationwide celebrity, and the foremost living author of his time— “the national writer,” as leading literary critic Wacław Borowy called him. Lionized by the new government, he was showered with honors, culminating in the National Literary Prize in 1922 and, in 1924, the gift of an apartment in the Royal Castle in Warsaw. Yet despite his shining career, these years were not happy ones for Żeromski. The fledgling country faced vast and overwhelming tasks in every area of public life, from agriculture and industry to health care and social welfare; worse, there were signs that the necessary progress was not being made. It was this frustration that lies at the heart of The Coming Spring. Żeromski portrays the early years of the Polish state, not from the point of view of an aging insider like himself, but from that of a young man from the outside, who is able to see the situation with a fresh eye. Furthermore, Cezary Baryka, the hero of the novel, has communist sympathies, which have left him with a particular sensitivity to the position of the poor and downtrodden. The intellectual thrust of the novel draws its power from Baryka’s dilemma—he is well aware of the horrors that communism can bring, having witnessed the Russian Revolution at first hand in Azerbaijan and in Russia itself; yet he cannot see a better way of introducing the massive changes that Poland needs. Baryka’s outsider status, and especially his experiences of revolution, offer Żeromski other possibilities too. Introduction ix The central section of the novel, “Nawłoć,” takes place in a country home belonging to a family of landed gentry , the Wielosławskis. This sort of territory was extremely familiar to Polish readers of the time—most notably from Pan Tadeusz, Adam Mickiewicz’s masterful epic poem of 1834, which is a nostalgic paean to the delights of life in such a home. Yet Żeromski’s manor house is infused with new and sinister themes. The chilling moment when Cezary grabs a sugar bowl and tries to warn his friend Hipolit that for this object alone, his servants could turn on their masters and murder them— such a moment would have been unthinkable in Pan Tadeusz, in which the thoughts and desires of the servants were rarely if ever present, and could never have been conceived of as hostile. In this, Żeromski provides a brilliant intertextual dialogue in which post-Marxian class consciousness, and the historical experience of the Russian Revolution, leads to a radically different rereading of a familiar literary trope in Polish Romantic literature. Despite Żeromski’s often rather Gothic turn of phrase and his dramatic imagery, The Coming Spring is to a significant extent a faithful portrait of Polish society in the early 1920’s. The author was well informed about the new state, and drew on numerous documentary sources in presenting his picture. Żeromski had long been concerned with the plight of the poor and the destitute, as his earlier novels...