4. Monsieur Valdemar
- Edgar Allan Poe, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845)
There was an instant return of the hectic circles on the cheeks; the tongue quivered, or rather rolled violently in the mouth (although the jaws and lips remained rigid as before;) and at length the same hideous voice which I have already described, broke forth: ‘For God's sake! -- quick! -- quick! -- put me to sleep -- or, quick! -- waken me! -- quick! -- I say to you that I am dead!’
Poe's short story The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar is a detailed description of a supposedly factual account of a man mesmerized (that is put into a hypnotic state) at the moment of his death, or as Poe writes, in articulo mortis. Conveniently, the protagonist Monsieur Ernest Valdemar is in the final stages of phthisis (tuberculosis) and the narrator, who happens to be Valdemar’s old friend, goes on to perform the terrifying act on his old pal. This leaves Monsieur Valdemar in a mesmeric state that lasts for seven months. During this time the man is without pulse, heartbeat or perceptible breathing, his skin cold and pale. Only sometimes does he seem to attempt to communicate with the outer world – a scary act which is at the centre of the terrifying and gruesome denouement of the piece.
But why are we talking about Valdemar in the first place? The narrator of the story at no point states that Valdemar is Polish or is of Polish descent, nor does the name ring a particularly Polish bell. However, some details suggest that this is precisely the case.
The scarce info that we get about Valdemar, his life, character and looks, comes in one of the first passages of the text.
In looking around me for some subject by whose means I might test these particulars, I was brought to think of my friend, M. Ernest Valdemar, the well-known compiler of the Bibliotheca Forensica, and author (under the nom de plume of Issachar Marx) of the Polish versions of Wallenstein and Gargantua. M. Valdemar, who has resided principally at Harlem, N. Y., since the year 1839, is (or was) particularly noticeable for the extreme spareness of his person -- his lower limbs much resembling those of John Randolph; and, also, for the whiteness of his whiskers, in violent contrast to the blackness of his hair -- the latter, in consequence, being very generally mistaken for a wig.
Describing Valdemar as ‘author’ of the Polish versions of Wallenstein and Gargantua (which are, respectively, Frederic Schiller's drama and Rabelais's novel), without calling him Polish, may be a bit strange. Still, it's the only reasonable conclusion: How else could he have become so fluent in Polish as to translate huge volumes of German and French literature into a remote Slavic language?
On the other hand, the clearly Jewish pen name (Issachar Marx) which Valdemar uses for his translation work likely suggests some kind of relation with the Jewish identity. The most probable conclusion which follows from these two pieces of info is that Valdemar is a Polish Jew.
In that case it would be only reasonable to ask when he arrived in the US. While the date (or even the fact) of Valdemar’s arrival in America is never ascertained, we learn that he ‘has resided principally at Harlem, N.Y., since the year 1839’. From this we could infer that Valdemar must have arrived in America in the 1830s (or earlier). If so, one would be tempted to connect his arrival with the wave of emigration from Poland which followed the November Uprising of 1830.
Admittedly, all of this would be quite tedious and potentially irrelevant if not for the general subject of E. A. Poe’s story, which deals with vital existential issues of life and death – one of its main concerns being the definition of life as a physiological process. One of the questions Poe asks can be paraphrased as: What does it mean to be alive without ostensible signs of life? Can one be at once dead and alive?
Well, exactly this, on a political plane, is what happened to Poland some 40 years before Poe wrote his story. Carved up by neighbouring countries, Poland virtually ceased to exist in 1795 – even if it continued to live in the more vague and ungraspable realm of people's minds and hearts. In fact, Poland's tragic fate served as a kind of topos in the literature of the day. Many poets wrote poems about Poland, depicting the death of the country. In one written by Alfred Tennyson we read:
The heart of Poland hath not ceased
To quiver, tho' her sacred blood doth drown
The fields;
Just as so many of his contemporaries, Poe must have been aware of the ontologically ambiguous and existentially uncanny status of Poland. That Poe was vitally interested in Poland is confirmed by his decision to join the November Uprising of 1830, a fact which some biographers list as a plausible cause for his expulsion from Westpoint.
Does Valdemar then stand for Poland? If so, his agony would also have to be read allegorically as the tormented death of Poland.
However, if this allegorical reading of Poe’s Gothic horror story is too much, you might consider another Polish link. The existential condition of Valdemar, a creature stuck between life and death, is reminiscent of the condition of a Polish upiór, a vampire-like creature known from Polish (and Slavic) folklore, and which became also a key figure of Polish Romantic literature, including among others E.A. Poe’s contemporary – Adam Mickiewicz.
For all these reasons, it would not be altogether illegitimate to call Valdemar a Polish literary upiór causa honoris.
5. Count Szemioth and Panna Iwińska
- Prosper Merimee, Lokis (1869)
Need more examples of gory supernatural creatures from Poland? Here's another one. As it turns out, before there was Transylvania, there was Lithuania. The country, or rather the region ( Lithuania, just like Poland, wasn’t a country at the time), is the location of the French writer Prosper Merimee’s horror fantasy novella, Lokis.
Written shortly before Merimee’s death, and some 30 years before Bram Stoker’s vampirical classic Dracula, Lokis recounts the mysterious Eastern European journey of the novella’s narrator Professor Wittembach. The famous Koenigsberg professor travels in search of an ancient book written in Samogitian (a Lithuanian dialect) and lands in a spooky Lithuanian palace where he is hosted by the mysterious Count Szemioth.
But the host, who is suspected by locals to be half-human half-bear (his mother had been mauled and, Merimee suggests, raped by a bear 9 months before the boy’s birth) exhibits some really strange behaviour and animal prowess, all the while still being a highly sophisticated member of aristocracy at the same time. In the tragic and bloody finale, the count, possibly in bear form, ravages the body of his newly wedded bride, the beautiful mademoiselle Julka Iwińska.
But even before that happens, we get a piece of writing which is brimming with complex intertextual references to Polish literature, particularly the work of Adam Mickiewicz. The novella features a spurious translation of his ballad Trzech budrysów, a poem which also serves as an important context for the story’s plot.
Throughout the work, Merimee, who was an accomplished translator of Russian literature and was interested in other Slavic cultures, uses some Polish words, like matecznik, taken from the Polish original of Pan Tadeusz. He also repeatedly refers to Julia as ‘panna’, which is a traditional Polish way of addressing unmarried women. Apart from panna Julka and count Szemioth (who is Lutheran, somewhat surprisingly), the Polish cast of the story includes members of Polish-Lithuanian aristocracy, duchess Pacowa and lady Dowgiełło.
Lokis remains one of the most unsettling and inspiring works with a werewolf theme (even if it’s more about a ‘were-bear’), and a gem of supernatural Polish references.
6. Captain Nemo?
- Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
‘Sir,’replied the commander, ‘I am nothing to you but Captain Nemo; and you and your companions are nothing to me but the passengers of the Nautilus.’
The eyes of the public turned once again to Poland in 1863, when Poles were fighting the Russian empire in a war which came to be known as the January Uprising, a yet another attempt to shrug off the imperial yoke. The event supposedly made a big impression on Jules Verne. The French author initially even envisaged Captain Nemo as a Polish January insurgent. In an early draft of the novel, Nemo was a Pole who was seeking revenge on Russians after they had killed or driven to Siberia most of his family. Additionally, his daughter was raped by Cossacks.
Unfortunately, the publisher of Verne’s works, afraid of the influential Russian circles in Paris, managed to convince the author that such a protagonist could eventually harm sales. As a result, Nemo is known today as an Indian prince who revolted against the English (an identity which is revealed only in Verne's Mysterious Island, a subsequently written sequel to 20 000 Leagues). Nevertheless, Nemo does certainly retain some dark secrets which, as we may surmise, hide possible traumas:
‘I am not what you call a civilised man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons which I alone have the right of appreciating. I do not, therefore, obey its laws, and I desire you never to allude to them before me again!’
All this means that Nemo would not only be a fictional but also a suppressed Polish appearance in world literature. But don't worry, careful readers of Verne will find another Polish trace on board the Nautilus, that is, a portrait of Tadeusz Kościuszko, hung in Captain Nemo’s cabinet.
7. King Ubu
- Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi (1896)
Papa Ubu: Ah! gentlemen, so beautiful but it doesn’t compare with Poland. If there weren’t any Poland, there would be no Poles!
With Alfred Jarry’s absurd masterpiece there can be no doubt we’re talking about Poland and Polish protagonists. The piece is famously set in Poland, ‘that is to say nowhere’ and subtitled as Les Polonais. The names of the main characters, like king of Poland Venceslas, his sons Boleslas, Ladislas, Bougrelas, the quasi-historical figures of Jean Sobieski and Stanislas Leczinski, as well as the whole Polish Army, all of which appear in the cast, leave little doubt as to their ethnic identity.
But why Poland in the first place? Jarry scholars link the origins of the play with the school pranks played by the young Jarry and his colleagues on their teacher M. Herbert (Ubu is a nonsense variation on the pronunciation of this name). One can easily imagine that the 19th-century history of Poland, as taught by Monsieur Herbert, must have been an exotic, memorable, and why not, intriguing topic for Jarry and his friends.