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The Formation of Modern Cracow (1866–1914)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2009

Lawrence D. Orton
Lawrence D. Orton
Affiliation:
Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State
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Extract

Poland's medieval and Renaissance capital and a mainspring of humanist learning in east central Europe, Cracow, suffered from neglect and decay after the Baltic-oriented Vasa dynasty transferred the court to Warsaw at the end of the sixteenth century. The first partition of Poland established the new border with Austria along the Vistula River, at the very gates of Cracow. Deprived of its hinterland, the city lost both suppliers and markets, and its commerce dried up. Local nobles and patricians abandoned the city for the more glittering and bustling life at the court of Stanisław August in Warsaw. Russian troops seized Cracow toward the end of the Kościuszko Insurrection and then ceded it to Austria in Poland's third partition. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, its population had shrunk to barely ten thousand. Ensuing Germanization was halted only when Cracow was joined in 1809 to the short-lived Duchy of Warsaw.

Type
Peoples and Culture
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , January 1983 , pp. 105 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 1983

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References

1 Two recent assessments of conditions in Cracow at the onset of Galician autonomy in the 1860s are Bieniarzówna, Janina and Małecki, Jan M., Dzieje Krakowa [History of Cracow], Vol. III: Kraków w latach 1796–1918 [Cracow, 1796–1918] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1979), pp. 228–237Google Scholar; and Purchla, Jacek, Jak powsta ł nowoczesny Kraków: Studia nad rozwojem budowlanym miasta w okresie autonoma galicyjskiej [How Modern Cracow Arose: Studies on the Building Development of the City in the Period of Galician Autonomy] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1979), pp. 13–25.Google Scholar

2 Cited in Homola, Irena, Kraków za prezydentury Mikołaja Zyblikiewicza (1874–1881) [Cracow During the Mayoralty of Mikołaj Zyblikiewicz, 1874–1881] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1976), p. 6.Google Scholar

3 The Cracow historian Irena Homola, in a study of the late nineteenth-century Cracow intelligentsia (including, in addition to teachers and professors, middle-echelon and higher officals, managers and administrators in private as well as municipal agencies, lawyers, notaries, engineers, surveyors, architects, members of the literary and artistic world, and clergy), has shown that Cracow had a relatively larger intelligentsia than Lwów, even though the latter was the administrative center of Galicia and possessed twice Cracow's population. “Struktura zawodowa inteligencji krakowskiej z końcem XIX. stulecia” [The Occupational Structure of Cracow's Intelligentsia at the End of the Nineteenth Century], Studia Historyczne, XXI, no. 3 (1978), 389–410.Google Scholar

4 On building construction in Cracow in this period, see especially Purchla, , Jak powstał nowoczesny Kraków, pp. 26–126Google Scholar, passim.

5 The Estreicher family, who played so important a role in Cracow's intellectual and scholarly life, had come from Moravia in the late eighteenth century; the Louis (later Wawel-Louis) family of merchants was originally French; Poland's and Cracow's most celebrated nineteenth-century painter, Jan Matejko, was of Czech ancestry. These families are but a few examples of the “foreign” infusion evident among Cracow's intelligentsia-burgher elite.

6 Estreicher, Stanisław, “Znaczenie Krakowa dia życia narodowego polskiego w ciągu w. XIX.” [Cracow's Significance for Polish National Life During the Nineteenth Century], in Kraków w XIX. w. [Cracow in the Nineteenth Century] 2 vols. (Cracow: Towarzystwo Miłośników Historii i Zabytków Krakowa, 1932), I, 15.Google Scholar

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8 Stefan Żeromski, Dziennik [Diary], cited in Bieniarzówna and Małecki, Kraków w latach 1796–1918, p. 262.

9 See especially Chrzanowski, Bernard, “Dziesięć lat tajnych wycieczek młodzieży z zaboru pruskiego do Krakowa, 1905–1914” [Ten Years of Secret Excursions by the Youth of Prussian Poland to Cracow, 1905–1914], reprinted in Kieniewicz, Stefan ed., Galicja w dobie autonomicznej (1850–1914) [Galicia in the Era of Autonomy, 1850–1914] (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1952), pp. 313–317.Google Scholar

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11 This writer has dealt with the Stańczyks in “The Stańczyk Portfolio and the Politics of Galician Loyalism,” a paper read at a session of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in New Haven in October 1979. An expanded version of this paper appears in Polish Review, XXVII, nos. 1/2 (1982), 55–64.Google Scholar

12 On the role of the Cracow historians in public life, see Buszko, Józef, “Historycy ‘Szkoły krakowskiej’ w życiu politycznym Galicji” [Historians of the “Cracow School” in the Political ife of Galicia], in Bobińska, Celina and Wyrozumski, Jerzy, eds., Spór o Historyczna Szkołę rakowska [The Controversy about the Cracow Historical School] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1972), pp. 191–207.Google Scholar

13 The most comprehensive history of the academy in this period is Hulewicz, Jan, Akademia Umiejętności w Krakowie 1873–1918: Zarys dziejów [The Academy of Learning in Cracow, 1873–1918: An Outline History] (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1958)Google Scholar. This author has discussed the academy in a paper, “The Role of Cracow's Academy of Learning (Akademia Umiejętności) in the Intellectual and National Life of Partitioned Poland,” which was presented in April 1981 at a session of the Midwest Slavic Conference in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

14 Dutkiewicz, Józef, ed., “Z papierów Marcelego Handelsmana” [The Papers of Marceli Handehman], Dzieje Najnowsza, V, no. 3 (1973), 189.Google Scholar

15 See Buszko, Józef, Społeczno-polityczne oblicze Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego w dobie autonomii galicyjskiej (1869–1914) [The Socio-Political Presence of the Jagiellonian University in the Period of Galician Autonomy, 1869–1914] (Cracow: Uniwersytet Jagielloński, 1963).Google Scholar

16 Cf. Dużyk, Józef, “Polskie Ateny” [Polish Athens], in Bieniarzówna, Janina, ed., Kraków story i nowy: Dzieje kultury [Cracow Old and New: A Cultural History] (Cracow: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1968), pp. 303–344.Google Scholar

17 7See Lechicki, Czesław, Krakowski “Kraj” (1869–1874) [The Cracow Newspaper Kraj, 1869–1874] (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1975)Google Scholar; and Zaremba-Piekara, Izabela, “Idee pozytywistyczne w Kraju Ludwika Gumplowicza” [The Idea of Positivism in Ludwik Gumplowicz's Newspaper Kraj], Rocznik Historii Czasopiśmiennictwa Polskiego, IX, no. 1 (1970), 17–32.Google Scholar

18 On political rivalries and alliances in fin-de-siècle Cracow, see especially Buszko, Józef, “Kraków w dobie autonomii galicyjskiej” [Cracow in the Period of Galician Autonomy], in Bieniarzówa, Janina, ed., Szkice z dziejów Krakowna [Sketches of Cracow's History] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1968), pp. 353–389.Google Scholar

19 Daszyński, Ignacy, Pamiętniki [Memoirs], 2 vols. (Warsaw: Ksiżka i Wiedza, 1957), II, 57.Google Scholar

20 The late Polish literary historian Kazimierz Wyka argued persuasively that if the Young Poland movement is understood to encompass art and the theater as well as literature, then Cracow unquestionably was its capital and fountainhead. “Kraków stolicą Młodej Polski” [Cracow, the Capital of Young Poland], in Bobińska, Celina, ed., Kraków i Małopolska przez dzieje [Cracow and Little Poland Throughout History] (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1970), pp. 339–352.Google Scholar

21 Although Polish artists exhibited frequently in Vienna after 1900, significant differences existed between the Polish and Austrian modernists. Polish fin-de-siècle artists were especially influenced by the Western symbolists and continued to infuse their works with “patriotic content.” The Viennese Secessionists, by contrast, strove exclusively to capture the imaginary “Reich des Schönen,” with an emphasis on decorative features. These differences have led the Austrian art historian Hans Bisanz to conclude that “Polish art of the period was little influenced by Austrian tendencies.” In short, he sees Polish and Austrian fin-de-siècle art representing two varied responses to the currents emanating from further west. “Polnische Künstler in der Wiener Secession und im Hagenbund,” Studia Austro-Polonica, II (1980), 29–30 and 41Google Scholar. See also Taborski, Roman, “O współpracy krakowskiej ‘Sztuki’ z wiedeńską ‘Secesją’” [The Cooperation of the Cracovian “Sztuka” with the Viennese “Secession”], Przegląd Humanistyczny, XIX, no. 4 (1975), 19–29.Google Scholar

22 Of the large number of remembrances and accounts of Michalik's Den and the Green Balloon cabaret, the most useful is Gawlik, Jan Paweł, Powrót do Jamy [Return to Michalik's Den] (Cracow: Wydawn. Artystyczno-Graficzne, 1961).Google Scholar

23 As recently as 1980, for example, the Cracow literary historian Tomasz Weiss lamented that “so far no one has undertaken a systematic examination of the possible interplay between fin-de-siècle Polish and Austrian literature.” “Die Krakauer Zeitschrift ‘Życie’ und die österreichischen modernistischen Zeitschriften,” Studia Austro-Polonica, II (1980), 179.Google Scholar