1. The title of this book review article is adapted from that of a book recently reviewed in Nationalities Papers, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2000), Jerzy Jedlicki's A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization (the original Polish title of which, rendered into English, would read “What Kind of Civilization Do Poles Need? Studies from the History of Ideas and Imagination of the Nineteenth Century”).Google Scholar

2. Jedlicki, op. cit., amply demonstrates this concept.Google Scholar

3. In Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Interestingly, Kizwalter criticizes another major theorist, Anthony Smith, whose view of nationalism has been embraced by many historians, for showing little knowledge of the Polish experience: Smith claimed that Polish nationalism was similar to Ukrainian, Slovak and Belorusian nationalisms (nations that often have been referred to as “non-historic”), rather than to those it more closely resembled, like the Hungarian (pp. 37–38).Google Scholar

4. This approach is also consonant with Gellner's thesis that nationalism is really something new and particular to the modern age.Google Scholar

5. Cf. Andrzej Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) and Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Nationhood: Polish Political Thought from Noble Republicanism to Tadeusz Kosciuszko (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).Google Scholar

6. In his book on Polish liberal thought, Maciej Janowski argues against applying the term “civil society” to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Commonwealth, but for a different reason: he claims that noblemen were citizens not of the entire state but of their own terrigena, much as burghers had no sense of belonging to a larger entity (p. 18). While Kizwalter would agree with the last part of this assertion, he nonetheless underscores—I believe correctly—the sense of state-wide political community as an important element connecting those within the noble estate across regional borders.Google Scholar

7. This has been done by Walicki, op. cit.Google Scholar

8. Kizwalter's careful reassessment of the reasons that motivated various actors in Polish history allows him to forward novel interpretations of a number of events in Polish history ranging from Targowica (pp. 123–27) to the November Insurrection (p. 167) as well as to demonstrate that the Poles' preoccupation with the restoration of independence developed much more slowly than had generally been thought.Google Scholar

9. Not all “defiant ones” became nationalists like Roman Dmowski: many became socialists. Porter is right to note the way the two groups, nationalists (whom Porter terms “patriots”) and socialists, overlapped and coexisted for years, only differentiating themselves in the late 1890s (pp. 104, 129).Google Scholar

10. Some small points of clarification regarding the celebrations: the idea for the Mickiewicz monument in Warsaw came not from a “loyalist editor of a provincial paper.” Gazeta Radomska was edited by a former Jagiellonian University student, Henryk Hugo Wróblewski, whose commitment to Polish patriotic celebrations was already evident in 1873, when he served as the chairman of the committee organizing the first Mickiewicz evening in Cracow. Likewise, the joke about the poet's initials on the tickets to the unveiling standing for ani mru mru (not a peep) referred not to loyalists' concerns that the event would turn into a demonstration, but to the fact that the unveiling would take place in silence, as the organizers were unwilling to begin with the tsarist anthem Bozhe tsaria khrani.Google Scholar

11. Actually, this is mentioned by Marcin Król, Konserwatyści a niepodlegśość: Studia nad polska̦ myśla̦ konserwatywna̦ XIX wieku (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy PAX, 1985), p. 211, who is cited by Kizwalter on p. 273.Google Scholar

12. See, for example, Roman Wapiński, Narodowa Demokracja 1893–1939: Ze studiów nad dziejami myśli nacjonalistycznej (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1980), pp. 82–83, on the fact that general nationalistic conceptions had emerged independently of the Endecja. This idea is developed further by Adam Wa̦tor, Działalność Stronnictwa Demokratycznego-Narodowego w zaborze austriackim do roku 1914 (Szczecin: Wydawnictwo naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecińskiego, 1993), pp. 14–15.Google Scholar

13. See, for example, “The Social Nation and Its Futures: English Liberalism and Polish Nationalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Warsaw,” American Historical Review, Vol. 101, No. 5 (1996), pp. 1470–92, or “Who is a Pole and Where is Poland? Territory and Nation in the Rhetoric of Polish National Democracy Before 1905,” Slavic Review, Vol. 51, No. 4 (1992), pp. 639–53.Google Scholar