Where Is Poland? | Aesopian language

Chapter 3

Aesopian language

Trying to circumvent the restrictions of censorship, Polish authors developed a distinctive way of writing, in which the real meaning of a text was written in a coded way. Called Aesopianlanguage, this means of communication had a long tradition stretching from Romanticism down to Realism.

Speaking in code

Known since antiquity and described in various terms, so-called Aesopian language developed in Poland in the nineteenth century, under conditions of state censorship. It was used to encode certain messages (above all political content) and to circumvent the obstacles imposed by Russian censors. Thanks to a well-developed system of understatement, allusion and insinuation, and also – as researchers write – paraphrases, metonymy, synecdoche, and ellipsis – this language facilitated a certain kind of communication with readers familiar with its codes. In the nineteenth century this style of writing, impenetrable for readers from outside, became the unofficial language of domestically-published Polish literature – present in both the press and literature.

Polish writers were excellently aware of what situation they were in. One of the masters of Aesopian language, Eliza Orzeszkowa, wrote this to her translator (in an uncensored letter):

No date and nothing that relates to the national struggles and suffering are referred to directly. This is, one might say, a prison style: tap this many times for this word, that many for another word, this sign for that concept, this sign for another. And we understand one another excellently, the author and the readers.

Seeking an understanding with her readers, Orzeszkowa invoked metaphors and allegories. That is why ‘Poland’ becomes in her novels the ‘native land’, ‘patriotism’ is supplanted by the term ‘stars’, etc. Censorship could also be avoided by shifting the plot setting to a distant place and time. Such writing became a constant game, played with readers and censors.

Russian officials were well aware of this game. The governor-general, Count Imertynsky, once rejected a distinguished St. Petersburg censor with 11 years’ experience as a candidate for a censorship post in Warsaw, arguing that the job required someone capable of 'understanding the complexity of Polish society'. 'The Warsaw press is full of double meanings, unclear allegories, seemingly naïve comparisons pertaining to things that may be small but are by no means unimportant'.

'Konrad Wallenrod', or can poetry ignite a national uprising?

One of the earliest instances of the employment of Aesopian language and its enormous impact on the Polish community can be found in Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poem Konrad Wallenrod. After being accused of engagement in a political conspiracy at Vilnius University, Mickiewicz spent his mid-twenties banished to Russia. In 1828, he wrote a work that would eventually change the path of both Polish literature and history.

Published in St. Petersburg and approved by the local censors, Konrad Wallenrod was a Byronesque epic poem set in the Medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the forced Christianisation of the country at the hands of the Teutonic Knights. The plot followed the story of a Lithuanian boy raised by the Teutonic Order, who rises to become the Grand Master of the order but eventually turns against the knights, and thus decides to avenge his people.

The work, which opens with a Machiavellian motto on the need to fight as both a lion and a fox, managed to escape censorship due to a personal conflict among the censors. Very soon it became a hit with Polish readers, who knew well enough how to read between the lines. For most readers it was obvious that in picturing the Medieval conflict between the pagan Lithuanians vs. the Teutonic Christian Missionaries, Mickiewicz was in fact portraying the plight of Poles living under Russian domination. And he was offering them some truly radical ways out. The ultimate subversive political message of the poem was actually scandalous: in the pursuit of patriotic goals, every means to that end is justified, including treason.

The book’s massive success and popularity among young people was often seen as a catalyst which led to the Polish November Uprising of 1830. The figure of Konrad Wallenrod became, for many decades, a role model for Polish national resistance. But perhaps more importantly, with Wallenrod, Mickiewicz was establishing a new strategy of writing and reading, one that would mark Polish literature for the whole rest of the century and beyond. From then on, when writing in Polish, one would indeed have to be both a lion and a fox.

Brandes also appreciated Mickiewicz's poetic greatness:

Such robustness of emotion is not found in any other Polish poet. Mickiewicz alone approached those great names in poetry, which stand in history as above all healthy, far healthier than Byron, healthier even than Shakespeare: Homer and Goethe.

Frame from the movie "Lalka", directed by Wojciech Jerzy Has, 1968. Photo: Film archive / FORUM

The Doll, or Aesopian realism

Writing realistic stories under a system of censorship might seem like a precarious feat, if not downright impossible. But such works were indeed published. One of the best of them is Bolesław Prus’ Lalka [The Doll]. The story of a nouveau-riche businessman’s unrequited love for a woman from high society, it was published in segments in the Warsaw press in 1887-1889 and quickly gained the status of a masterpiece.

To avoid censorship, Prus opted simply not to mention whole fragments of the existing reality. The book does not mention a word about the Russians, about what life had been like before Poland came under partition, or about Russian elements in the urban space of Warsaw. That explains why, when walking along the main thoroughfare of Krakowskie Przedmieście, the main character ‘doesn’t notice’ the monuments to Ivan Paskevich and the loyalists – two prominent symbols of Russian dominance in the city space.

At the same time, political content, such as information about the January Uprising and its repercussions, was conveyed by means of a system of allusions, legible to readers experienced in interpreting the codes of Aesopian language but still under-the-radar to censors. One of the most famous sentences of the book tells us of the main character:

He and the rest of them sowed the harvest we are still reaping today, and in the end Wokulski finished somewhere in the neighbourhood of Irkutsk.

If this enigmatic sentence, self-explanatory for Polish readers of the day, were to be translated from Aesopian into more normal language, it might go like this:

He and the rest of them engaged in an illegal patriotic conspiracy [i.e. took part in the January Uprising], the repercussions of which we still have to deal with today, and in the end he ended up being deported to Siberia as punishment.

The author of The Doll, Bolesław Prus, was one of the greatest figures of Positivism in Warsaw, a productive essayist and an unflagging advocate of modernity, urging the continued modernization of Polish society. In this he was in many respects similar to George Brandes. Indeed, he very much appreciated the importance of the Danish writer and his opinions about Polish culture:

We Poles sit inside our literature as if inside a beloved house, outside of which, if we do ever stick our heads out, it is only through the little vent window. Brandes, on the other hand, is a traveller who sees our house from the outside and who has moreover seen many other homes.