The Enlightenment
The final wave of fascination with Greco-Roman antiquity (in the French version) brought a new trend in art and architecture to this region beyond the boundaries of the Roman empire: the intentional seeking of direct contact with the material heritage of antiquity. The region came within the influence of the collections of antiquities in Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. In Poland, King Stanislaw August (1764-95) encouraged the remodeling of original historic buildings (the Royal Castle and the Tazienki Palace in Warsaw).
In the Commonwealth, Enlightenment ideas and literature accompanied attempts to reform the noble-state and reshape historical memory, with the help of signs from the ancient tradition, in a process whereby references to the republic were replaced with references to the principate. The partitioning of the Commonwealth by Russia, Prussia, and Austria was the culmination of the process, ongoing since the seventeenth century, of dividing central-eastern Europe among the eastern and western powers. Consequently, in this region the nineteenth-century building of new national identities differed from western Europe’s: for the nations without states, reinterpretation and mythologization of the past (invented tradition) would replace other integrating factors.
6.2 Romanticism, neohumanism, and philhellenism
In the early nineteenth century, German neohumanism began to dominate the region’s reflections on antiquity. Its characteristic philhellenism harmonized with Romanticism. Hybrid forms of the reception of antiquity emerged, stemming from new stimuli merging with domesticated Latin culture, which reached deep into social structures, and with French elite culture. One interesting example is the multiethnic community of the Philomat and Philaret Society (Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belarusians), founded at Vilnius University (1817-25) around a philhellenic seminar transplanted there from Gottingen. Disbanded by the Russian police (the university was soon closed), it left a lasting trace as an attempt to build a ‘‘civic society’’ with ancient legitimization.
One Philomat, the Polish Romantic ‘‘bard’’ Mickiewicz, lecturing at the College de France in Paris (1842-6), presented the idea of the rebirth of Europe through rejection of both the classicist French version of Latin tradition and the Byzantine tyranny of the Russian empire. Mickiewicz saw the heritage of the Commonwealth, and more broadly Slavic central-eastern Europe (for political reasons he counted Hungarians and Lithuanians among Slavs), as a chance, first, for a new evangelization of Europe, in the spirit of freedom and fraternity of a classless society seeking a model in ancient Roman Christianity, and second, for spreading the idea of freedom, which would allow the parliamentary system to be replaced by the consensus on which the republicanism of the nobles had theoretically been based (Axer 2005).
Philhellenism also functioned in Russian political thought and imperial propaganda. As Tsar Alexander’s foreign minister (1803-5), the Polish Prince Czartoryski linked the idea of resurrecting Greece with the concept of uniting central-eastern Europe as an autonomous part ofthe empire, seeing this as a chance for the rebirth of the Commonwealth. Later, philhellenism served as a foundation for revolutionary slogans and the community of peoples deprived of their own state (e. g., Czartoryski’s emigre activity in Paris after 1830) (Axer forthcoming).
6.3 Imperial education versus home education
Education offered a paradox important for the reception of ancient culture in the region. While academic reflection on Greco-Roman antiquity was part of civic education in the west, in this region foreign schools were there to teach loyalty toward foreign empires. In opposition to this system, home education mythologized the local cultural tradition (e. g., neo-Sarmatism in Poland).
In western European literature, art, and journalism, the classical tradition consolidated the positive attitude of the citizens toward their state and strengthened its position in disputes with other powers (e. g., ‘‘Latin’’ France vs. ‘‘Hellenic’’ Germany). In central-eastern Europe, antiquity served to express attitudes of indifference or hostility toward foreign authority (e. g., in Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis, 1896, which presented Russia as Nero’s Rome, with the fate of the Poles associated with the fate of the first martyrs). It would seem that the relationship between teaching the classics and the process by which the elite accumulated power and created control mechanisms, a relationship characteristic of western Europe, does not really work in central-eastern Europe. The modernization that new nations of central-eastern Europe achieved was based on a construction of the past meant to legitimize the present. In this region, ‘‘multiple antiquities meant multiple modernities’’ (Klaniczay and Werner 2005).
World History
