Silent Intelligentsia: A Study of Civilizational Oppression Edited by Jan Kieniewicz. Warsaw: Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies "Artes Liberales," University of Warsaw, 2009. 208 pages. ISBN 978-83-920349-9-5.
Jan Kieniewicz, the editor and contributor to this volume, and a stellar team of his fellow scholars from Polish, French, and Russian universities and academies of science and the American Council of Learned Societies take part in a fascinating, complex interdisciplinary project. They observed that, despite our knowledge about expansion of European empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, researchers had, up to the early years of this decade, not attempted to apply the paradigm of colonialism to those central and eastern European areas into which Russia and Germany had expanded. Instead, they applied it only to far-flung, non-European areas of the globe. What effect did the colonial power and its educational system have on these subjugated peoples? Did they suffer civilizational oppression from an alien Other that challenged their culture and value system? Kieniewicz and his colleagues set out to answer these and many other questions.
They assumed the existence of spontaneously formed intelligentsias (Polish and others), each with a self-appointed mission to identify and articulate the national identity and to speak to the foreign colonial authorities on behalf of their own people, victims of political aggression, in order to lead them in the modernization and transformation of their society. Thus emerged the present project, "Silent Intelligentsia. A Study of Civilizational Oppression" in 2004-2005 out of debates during a seminar at the Center for Studies on the Classical Tradition in Poland and East Central Europe at the University of Warsaw. During the following three years, the contributors individually sought to answer questions or test hypotheses on numerous facets of the larger project. They returned to a follow-up conference in 2007 with some answers as well as some new questions. The present volume reports on their experiences and conclusions.
Contributors, themselves active researchers in postcolonial studies in non-European areas of the world, apply their expertise in the present volume to throw light on the central and eastern watches o European, particularly the Polish, experience. For example, they wanted to know how the intelligentsia's mission was affected when the only education open to them was delivered in the foreign language and literary tradition of the occupier, as it had been in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland in the nineteenth century. Was this analogous to the Indian experience under the Raj? Of all the fragments that had once made up the lands of the Rzeczpospolita, it was here that the intelligentsia had the greatest opportunity to define the Polish national identity and contribute to the modernization of its society. Their analysis is not entirely confined to the Polish lands of the Russian partition. Brief but informative descriptions are given of the political violence and civilizational oppression suffered in the lands of the Prussian partition that kept the Polish intelligentsia outside the power structure. On the other hand, Austrian Galicia is portrayed as having a relatively free Polish intelligentsia under no civilizational threat and enjoying opportunities unheard of in the other partitions. It was, however, an extremely conservative stratum that allied itself with the traditional, rather than modernizing, influences in the periphery of the Habsburg Empire.
Individual studies address very diverse and interesting topics: the degree of the intelligentsia's success in awakening national consciousness among the various peoples of Siberia; the plight of an African intelligents
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