Józef Mianowski is a constant presence in the history of Polish scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries. This is thanks mainly to the Fund of assistance for people working in the field of science named after Józef Mianowski, Doctor of Medicine, and set up in memory of the only rector of Warsawâs Main School. The Fund was an institution which before the First World War replaced the non-existent Polish ministry of science and education under Russian occupation. Later, too, it played a significant role in supporting the development of learning in independent Poland3.
The Mianowski Fund embedded itself in the memory of generations not only thanks to its financing of research, founding of scholarships and supporting publications. It also grew into an exemplary social institution which embraced almost all prominent Polish scholars and writers, especially at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th â involving not just the elite of the Warsaw intelligentsia of the period but essentially the whole community of Polandâs scholars. This was not particularly numerous, at least until the end of the 2nd Republic4, and it would be harder to draw up a list of those who did not avail themselves of the assistance of the Mianowski Fund than to name those whom it helped as they made their way in scholarship and literature. And it needs to be added that even at the turn of the 20th century literary writing was still generally regarded as being on a par with scholarly research.
The memory of Mianowski persists. There are traces of it in the public arena, such as the hall bearing his name on the ground floor of the Kazimierzowski (Casimir) Palace, now housing the University rectorate, and the memorial inscription in the building of the former Main School being a quotation from his speech (unfortunately after refurbishment this inscription has disappeared); there is also the Mianowski street in Warsawâs Ochota district, near Narutowicz square. Mention of Mianowski is made in nearly all papers dealing with scholarship in the second half of the 19th century and to the growth of disciplines of that period, from the belles-lettres mentioned earlier to mathematical-nature sciences. Reactivated in 1991, the Mianowski Fund now exists as a foundation for the support of learning.
When however, we make a closer scrutiny of the sources, in search of information about the rector of the Main School and his personal life journey before taking up the position, it turns out that despite the plethora of memorial articles, all kinds of literary oddments, various silva rerum and miscellanea, there has been no single work which would present Mianowskiâs biography. What is still the most reliable and irreplaceable summary is Stefan Kieniewiczâs profile of Mianowski in the Polish Biographical Dictionary5.
As Grzegorz BÄ biak observed in the latest, comprehensive edition of materials regarding the history of the Main School:
Józef Mianowski has survived only because his grateful alumni decided to erect a statue to him which was more long-lasting than bronze. Instead of a figure on a pedestal they set up a Fund which supported (and supports) the development of scholarship. But were you to ask who Mianowski was, even putting the question to the capitalâs university students themselves â few would be able to give an answer. The common factor for all concerned was the Warsaw Main School, mentioned above all in the biographies of its most famous graduates from the Positivist generation6.
Mianowski was a colourful and remarkable figure. An outstanding medical practitioner, with a modest body of scholarly work, he remained in his contemporariesâ memory above all thanks to his character traits â everyone emphasised his extraordinary kindness, modesty, disinterested demonstrations of help and love of people â and thanks also to a certain sentimentality and an exceptional, if rather involuntary â one might say intuitive â patriotism.
Investigating Mianowskiâs life story, I wondered: which was his dominant personality and character trait? Which single attribute can one pick which would define his views, his attitude in life or his world outlook? And what immediately came to my mind was the title of what is still probably the best-known book by Professor Andrzej Walicki: In the Circle of Conservative Utopia7. I asked myself: could Mianowski be in some way included in the circle of âRussian Slavophilesâ with Polish roots? But I abandoned that thought, since, firstly, Mianowski was undeniably a Polish patriot, and so if he belonged to any circle, it would be that of radical Polish Slavophiles, émigrés grouped around Joachim Lelewel or Józef Hoene-WroÅski: but for them it was the Poland of the past that was the heartland of Slavism, while Russia was its negation. Secondly, at the time when Mianowski lived and worked Russian Slavophilism was first at its peak and then declined, only gaining wider social resonance in the second half of the 19th century. Furthermore, I found hardly any convincing source-based evidence that he personally knew any of the Russian Slavophiles, although they were almost all peers of his in terms of age, like Mikhail P. Pogodin (1800â1875), not to mention Alexey S. Khomiakov (1804â1860), Ivan V. Kireyevsky (1806â1856), the elder Sergey T. Aksakov (1791â1859) and the younger Ivan (1823â1886). They were indeed of the same generation as our protagonist. But their milieu was far removed from the circles that Mianowski moved in. His connections were first and foremost with Petersburg and its aristocratic elite, quite different in its thinking â at least in the first half of the 19th century â from the Russian intelligentsia of Moscow. There were some Slavophile tendencies in Petersburg too, but perhaps because their advocates were connected with the aristocracy, they did not find fertile ground. In addition, Mianowski had few acquaintances in Moscow, which was the main point of reference for the Slavophiles. The fact remains that while Mianowski served as a link man between Russian Slavophiles from aristocratic circles and Polish émigrés â also Slavophile, but in a different way â and leading members of the Polish aristocracy, there is no trace of any specific outcomes resulting from such liaisons. All we are left with, therefore, is conservatism.
Similarly, I found no source materials that would indicate that Józef Mianowski had contacts with Ukraineâs Dnieper-based intelligentsia, linked to the Brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius which existed in Kyiv in 1845â18478. Here, though, we are dealing with a generation that is ten to 20 years younger than our protagonist. Moreover, all of them â Taras Szevchenko, Mykola (Nikolay) Kostomarov, Panteleymon Kulish, Mykola Hulak, Vasil Bilozersky â were based in Kyiv, which Mianowski rarely visited. During the time when they were active in the Brotherhood, they professed views which even then might have been too radical for Mianowski. While envisaging a future Ukraine that was in close alliance with Russia, they demanded â or at least that was their vision of the future â greater cultural freedom and, above all, an autonomous, separate space for the literary Ukrainian language that was taking shape at the time. The only member of that circle of Dnieper-based intellectuals whom Mianowski had every likelihood of knowing was Panteleymon Kulish, who in 1864â1869 worked as a clerk in Warsaw. Kulish was on good terms with several Poles, including some whom Mianowski knew well: the poet MichaÅ Grabowski, Archbishop Ignacy HoÅowiÅski and Józef Ignacy Kraszewski. Mianowski might even have met Kulish earlier on in the Aleksandrówka of the Grabowskis, though probably, due to the difference in age (Kulish having been born in 1819), a first meeting would have taken place in Warsaw. There is also nothing to point to any interest on Mianowskiâs part in the nascent separatist aspirations which at that time were gaining traction in Ukraine, and in Kyiv especially.
Mianowskiâs conservatism was of the liberal type: its points of reference were the ideas of such thinkers as Alexis de Tocqueville or Edmund Burke. Accordingly, it concerned itself particularly with the sphere of social values, involving a mistrust of revolution and a profound respect for family, property, religion, and nation, while broadly leaving free the economic and business area. Freedom, strictly defined, was for Mianowski the paramount value.
Mianowski was a conservative, with everything this entailed. His ideology was typical of 19th century thinking in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The doctor aspired to be a loyal subject of the Russian emperor. At the same time, he had very close links with the leading lights of academia, aristocracy, and finance, and the upper echelons of the Roman Catholic church. Fate dictated that on a few occasions he had to manoeuvre in politically awkward situations. In essence, his problem was the need to choose between toeing the line and being loyal on the one hand, and on the other veering on the side of a dangerous Polish patriotism which in practical terms could have resulted in exile to Siberia and the end of his career. Despite the naivety sometimes ascribed to him he was able on such perilous occasions to rise to the challenge, and indeed to demonstrate personal courage. His conservatism was thus â in my opinion â less restrictive and more open to others, especially to so-called âordinary peopleâ, than that of Prince Jan Tadeusz Lubomirski or Margrave Aleksander Wielopolski. To some extent his compassionate attitude to people from the lower social orders found its reflection in the entire Positivist movement in Warsaw. Among the eulogists of the memory of the rector of Warsawâs Main School was none other than âthe Pope of Polish Positivismâ, Aleksander ÅwiÄtochowski9. Mianowski had close friends, or people that he cared about, both in the homeland and abroad. But they included rebellious and radical students from Vilnius, Petersburg or Warsaw who could not in any way be deemed to have been supporters of compromise and realpolitik. They were certainly not conservatives: rather, they belonged with the progressive radicals of their time.
How did it happen that a man respected by the Tsarâs family, personally appreciated and singled out by Nicholas I himself â known to be ill-disposed to Poles â and by his successor, Alexander II, a man who was liked by the elite of Petersburg aristocracy â a man, in brief, who was a typical loyalist of his time â has remained in Polish memory as a model of patriotism and national virtues, almost the equal of Romuald Traugutt, the dictator of the 1863 uprising who was executed on the hillside of Alexanderâs Warsaw Citadel? Why has Mianowski remained so loved, while another Pole with a similar attitude to Russia and Russians, Margrave Aleksander Wielopolski, has been condemned to eternal opprobrium in the pantheon of collective memory? Józef Mianowskiâs case brought into sharp relief particular Polish imponderables: organic work versus armed struggle, loyalism versus patriotism, conservatism and concession versus an intransigent stance towards the occupying power. The sensitive and emotive Mianowski, with a sentimentalism characteristic of his compatriots from the Umanâ region and Ukraine, apparently acted on impulse, on the need of the moment. That he did not end his life exiled to Siberia was probably thanks to quite unusual luck, including the good fortune of finding people, Poles, and Russians, to help him along his way. Poland â as also, significantly, Russia â were his âadopted fatherlandsâ, although his real âpetite patrieâ was undoubtedly Ukraine, and to a lesser extent Lithuania.
In relation to Poland, a country which was then non-existent on the maps of Europe, Mianowskiâs stance was rather typical and characteristic of people coming from the eastern territories of the First Republic. He did not know Poland. He did not know Mazovia or MaÅopolska (Lesser Poland), or Wielkopolska (Greater Poland). He saw Pomerania and Silesia more as districts of the Prussian partition than â in fragments at least â historical parts of the Crown. He did not perceive Poland as an ethnographic entity. Rather, it represented to him an ideal of a lost country: the historical Commonwealth. That perception quite likely allowed him to forget that the Commonwealth was the Commonwealth of Both Nations: he would have referred to it simply as Poland. Undoubtedly, however, pride of place in his picture of that country would have been occupied by Ruthenia and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, lands which he knew from his childhood and youth. Warsaw, Kraków and Lviv, in contrast, appeared in the imagination primarily as patriotic points of reference. The reality was Umanâ, Vilnius and Krzemieniec, and Polish landed estates around Vilnius and in the Podole, Volhynia and Kyiv regions.
It so happened that his life journey took him to many pivotal moments in the history of Polish-Russian relations, in places were the fate of Poland and the Poles was being decided in the vast territories of the Russian partition. He studied and worked in Vilnius when it was still flourishing, but also after the closure of the cityâs university. It was there that he lived through both the November Uprising of 1830â1831 and the Szymon Konarski affair. It was in Vilnius too that he witnessed the liquidation of the union of churches and the subordination of the Greek Catholic Church to the Orthodox Church in 1839.
In the 1840s and 1850s he lived in Petersburg, where he belonged to the Polish conservative elite connected with the Russian aristocracy and Tsarist establishment. From that vantage point he bore witness to the harshest repressions at the tail end of the rule of Nicolas I, but also to the first reforms introduced by the new tsar, Alexander II.
In the 1860s he created and then managed Warsawâs Main School. He also played a minor role in the events of the January Uprising of 1863â186410 in the Polish Kingdom. It was in Warsaw that he witnessed and experienced the repressions that followed the insurrection, the dissolution of the Main School and burgeoning Russification. In short, then, Mianowskiâs story mirrors the typical experiences not so much of the Polish landed gentry of the period as the travails of the Polish intelligentsia, making a living out of intellectual work. Yes, Józef Mianowski was first and foremost a member of the Polish intelligentsia: not an outstanding intellectual, perhaps, but a representative of the âthinking classâ11. Though he came from a family of impoverished gentry and belonged to the Polish and Russian elite, his advancement to that elite was due in large part to his own effort and perseverance.
Though not naturally inclined towards politics, he was on at least two occasions involved in political activity, though in both cases this was more by chance than by personal choice. He spent his last years as a de facto émigré, though remaining to the end of his life a loyal Russian subject.
It is worth pointing out one feature of Mianowskiâs biography. In generational terms, he belonged with the Romantics. Many of his friends and colleagues were driven by their literary work, and especially their engagement in the struggle against Russia, and the tumultuous events of the post-partition Republic, to emigrate. A whole gallery of poets and writers presents itself here, Juliusz SÅowacki being the most important. From the outset, however, Mianowski was more of a Positivist. This stemmed from his profession as a doctor, but also from his character. While fascinated by literature and poetry, as were most of his contemporaries, he elected from the very start of his career to tread the path of organic work. By a strange quirk of fate he became, in the 1860s, the spiritual father of the entire Positivist movement in Warsaw, becoming the undisputed authority to BolesÅaw Prus, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Aleksander ÅwiÄtochowski and the whole generation of the Main School. In this way his life story also holds a mirror, on a micro scale, to the history of Polish social thought and national philosophy in the 19th century. This allows to see the Polesâ way of thinking in that period, and the transformation it underwent under the hammer-blows of successive national defeats. In Mianowskiâs case it is clear, that he bemoaned the tragic fate of his friends and colleagues, prevented from the possibility of returning to their homeland. On the other hand, he believed that for the good of the country it was necessary to remain in place and build from the foundations upwards. Although we lack convincing and unequivocal source materials to confirm this, he probably disapproved of many of their decisions regarding political activity and commitment to fighting the Tsarist empire.
Mianowskiâs life story has in a sense dictated the structure of this book, whose five main sections correspond to his geographical peregrinations. The first covers his Ukrainian period â particularly his schooling in Umanâ, but also a short and far from complete genealogy of the Mianowski family. The second, and most substantial, concerns Lithuania, and in particular Vilnius, in which Mianowski attained general acclaim and professional success. The third part is an account of Mianowskiâs situation in Russia, living in the Empireâs capital, Petersburg. It was there that the medical practitioner earned the permanent gratitude not only of the imperial family and the aristocratic elite of the city but also of countless Poles whom he helped in a variety of ways through difficult times. Petersburg also proved, contrary to his own expectations, to be a springboard that took him to the next phase of his career â in Warsaw, in the Polish Kingdom. The fourth section relates Mianowskiâs activities there, principally in the cityâs Main School. The fifth deals with the least known part of his life: he moved to Italy to spend his last years there, in Senigallia on the Adriatic coast.
The book draws on a broad database of sources which is ample but not homogeneous, and, is rather uneven in tracing the life journey of Józef Mianowski. Thus, details on his final years are scarce while the previous periods of Umanâ, Vilnius, Petersburg and Warsaw are reasonably well documented. Materials that have been accessed come from the Russian State Historical Archives in Petersburg, the Lithuanian State Historical Archives in Vilnius and the State Archives of the Capital City of Warsaw; use has also been made of small compilations of letters to be found in the collections of unpublished correspondence of the National Library in Warsaw, the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków, the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) Archives in Warsaw and the PAN and Polish Academy of Sciences and Letters (PAU) Archives in Kraków, the National OssoliÅski Institute in WrocÅaw and the Kórnik and Rapperswil libraries.
Much use has also been made of materials in print: numerous memoirs, and correspondence, in particular that of Hersylia née Bécu; Teofil of the Januszewskis; and Juliusz SÅowacki, Seweryn GoszczyÅski and Józef Bohdan Zaleski. Other sources include papers on the history of institutions: of the Umanâ county Basilian school, the University of Vilnius, the Vilnius Medical-Surgical Academy, the Medical-Surgical Academy in Warsaw, and Warsawâs Main School. An important source of information was provided by the various articles dispersed among the 19th century periodicals of Vilnius, Warsaw, and Petersburg, and of Lviv and Kraków. It would be useful at this point to emphasise the contribution of the Warsaw lawyer, bibliophile, and philanthropist Leopold Méyet, who was the first to take up the task of researching the biography of our protagonist.
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In 1868 â the year before the Main School was dissolved â Mianowski was rector and full professor of the Main School, permanent member council of the curator of the Warsaw Scientific Circle (of the Ministry of Education), member of the Medical Council of the Polish Kingdom. He was vice-president of the ZachÄta Society of Fine Arts in the Kingdom, as well as chairman of the private board of Warsawâs Hospital of the Baby Jesus. He had been awarded class IV â one of the highest â ranks of a councillor state. He was Knight of the Order of St Anne 1st Class, St Stanislae 1st Class and St Vladimir 2nd class. He had been distinguished for 25 years of exemplary service and had two dark bronze medals: one for achievements in the 1853â1856 Turkish war and the other in recognition of his help in suppressing the âPolish rebellionâ12 of 1863â1864. Seven years after the abolition of the Main School, in 1876, he also received the order of St Vladimir, 2nd Class, and a 12-year stipend amounting to 2500 roubles per year13. Those last distinctions, which were awarded to him some three years before his death, he owed to the protection of Field Marshal Prince Alexander I. Bariatynsky, the personal intervention of the minister of public goods Piotr A. Valuyev, and the good will of two Warsaw governors â the former one, Fyodor F. Berg and the incumbent, Pavel J. Kotzebue.
So how did Mianowski, 72 years of age at the time, manage to hold on to such influence in Petersburg and yet not lose hold of his popular support in Warsaw?
Was he really a typical loyalist, as appears from the archives about his service along the successive steps up the ladder of imperial hierarchy of officialdom? Or did he do everything to conceal his Polish patriotism and, as many of his compatriots, was one more example of âWallenrodyzmâ14? He loved and understood the Poland of the past, or more precisely what remained of the heritage of the former Commonwealth. What, though, was his real attitude towards Russia? Did he hate it, or love it? Or did he perhaps simply use his Petersburg prism to treat it as a cosmopolis, a perfect place to further his career and enjoy financial success? Might Russia for him have been Petersburg â a city of glitter and opportunities, like Paris? Such questions unfold themselves as we ask them. Perhaps we can answer at least a few.
S. GoszczyÅski, PieÅni prorocze ks. Marka, [w:] Z. Wasilewski, Z życia poety romantycznego. Seweryn GoszczyÅski w Galicji: nieznane pamiÄtniki, utwory i listy 1832â1842, Lwów 1910, pp. 44â45.
J. Czech, Margrabia Wielopolski, composed and performed by PrzemysÅaw Gintrowski. https://www.piosenkaztekstem.pl/opracowanie/przemyslaw-gintrowski-margrabia-wielopolski/.
Kasa Mianowskiego 1881â2011, ed. L. Zasztowt, Warsaw 2011; P. Hübner, J. Piskurewicz, J. SoszyÅski, L. Zasztowt, A History of the Józef Mianowski Fund, transl. and ed. by J. SoszyÅski, Warsaw 2013; Z. Szweykowski, Zarys historii Kasy im. Mianowskiego, âNauka Polskaâ 1932, vol. 15, pp. 1â202; S. Fita, Pokolenie SzkoÅy GÅównej w życiu spoÅecznym i kulturze polskiej, Warsaw 1980; M. Brykalska, Aleksander ÅwiÄtochowski. Biografia, vol. 1â2, Warsaw 1981â1987.
I.e. the period between the two world wars.
S. Kieniewicz, Mianowski Józef (1804â1879), [in:] Polski SÅownik Biograficzny [PSB], WrocÅaw 1974, vol. 19, p. 523â525. Cf. Earlier biographical notes on Mianowskiego: Encyklopedia Powszechna S. Orgelbranda, Warsaw 1864, vol. 18, p. 452; Encyklopedia Ogólna Wiedzy Ludzkiej, Redakcji âTygodnika Illustrowanegoâ, Warsaw 1875, vol. 9, p. 227; Encyklopedia Powszechna S. Orgelbranda, Warsaw 1884, vol. 7, p. 441; EnciklopediÄeskij Slovarâ F. Brokgauza, I.A. Efrona, St. Peterburg 1897, vol. 20, p. 362.
The Polish Positivists were a literary, philosophical, and social movement of the second half of the 19th century which eschewed revolutionary fervour and concentrated on civil society and working âfrom the ground upâ.
A. Walicki, W krÄgu konserwatywnej utopii. Struktura i przemiany rosyjskiego sÅowianofilstwa, Warsaw 1964, 2nd ed. Warsaw 2002.
J. GoÅÄ bek, Bractwo Åw. Cyryla i Metodego w Kijowie, Warsaw 1935; S. Kozak, UkraiÅscy spiskowcy i mesjaniÅci: Bractwo Cyryla i Metodego, Warsaw 1990; J. Remy, Brothers or Enemies: the Ukrainian National Movement and Russia, 1840s to the 1870s, Toronto 2016.
Many instances of this can be found in the biography of ÅwiÄtochowski by Maria Brykalska.
Named âJanuaryâ after the month in which it began, this insurrection, ultimately a failure, was a key event in 19th century Polish history.
An expression coined by Ryszarda Czepulis-Rastenis. See R. Czepulis-Rastenis, âKlassa umysÅowaâ: inteligencja Królestwa Polskiego 1832â1862, Warsaw 1973. Cf. J. Jedlicki, BÅÄdne koÅo. Dzieje inteligencji polskiej do roku 1918, ed. J. Jedlicki, vol. 2, Warsaw 2008, p. 169, 258; M. MiciÅska, Inteligencja na rozdrożach 1864â1918. Dzieje inteligencji polskiej do roku 1918, ed. J. Jedlicki, vol. 3, Warsaw 2008, pp. 64, 66.
Rossijskij Gosudarstvennyj IstoriÄeskij Arhiv v Sankt Peterburgie [RGIA], fond [f.] 733, opisâ [op.] 147, edinica hranenÄ [e.hr.] 752, FormulÄrnyj spisok o službe, sheet (k.) 3.
S. Kieniewicz, Mianowski Józef (1804â1879), p. 524.
After the hero of Konrad Wallenrod â a novel in verse by Polandâs leading romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz â who employs deceit and subterfuge in pursuit of noble aims.