Język angielski

A Biography Of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz 1872-1905



Though Marxists have come to be somewhat out of fashion in recent years, Timothy Snyder devoted his dissertation to Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, a Marxist and the most important political theorist of the Polish Socialist Party PPS in its early years. But in the case of Kelles-Krauz, the drawback of his Marxism seems to be outweighed by the fact that in the centre of his political writings was the emergence of modern nations and nationalism in central Europe during the nineteenth century, a subject that has attracted much attention in academe and the public since the fall of communism. Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz was born in Russian-ruled Poland in 1872. He descended from an old Livonian noble family which had lived since the seventeenth or eighteenth century in Lithuania. The family"s estate had been confiscated as punishment for the participation of Kazimierz"s father in the Polish uprising of 1863-64. The father then worked in excise offices in different places in Russian Poland, until the family finally settled in Radom in 1882. Kazimierz stayed in Radom until 1891, when he finished school, and left for Paris after being denied admission to the Russian university in Warsaw. In 1901 he moved from Paris to Vienna, where he stayed until his early death from tuberculosis in 1905 at the age of 33. Kelles-Krauz was the only Marxist among the leaders of the PPS, and he defended the PPS"s goal of reestablishing the Polish state from a Marxist point of view. On this subject, he became the main ideological antagonist of Rosa Luxemburg, who regarded the aim of Polish independence as harmful to the cause of the working class. She attacked the PPS because of its "social patriotic" politics and program. Snyder defines two main tasks for this biography: to portray in the life of Kelles-Krauz the typical traits of the Polish intelligentsia at the end of the nineteenth century, and to acquaint the English language reader with his works. Kelles-Krauz has remained, in contrast to Rosa Luxemburg, rather unknown outside Poland. Before Snyder"s book appeared, there existed in English only a small chapter on him in Leszek Kolakowski"s Main Currents in Marxism , and a short article about his view of the "Jewish question." 1 Much has been published in Poland on this Polish Marxist since the 1960s, when with the end of the Stalin era a positive evaluation of Kelles-Krauz became possible. 2 Today the Polish post-Communist party, the Socjaldemokracja Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej , has named one of its foundations after him. Research has been facilitated by the edition of his Selected Works and his letters. Snyder has complemented these basic sources with many further publications not included in the Selected Works . He also studied the published memoirs and letters of people who knew Kelles-Krauz or corresponded with him, and consulted the archives in Warsaw, Wroclaw, Paris, and at the Hoover Institution. At the Hoover Institution, materials from the Paris branch of the Russian Okhrana provided the author with information about the politician"s life as an Michael Sobelman. "Polish Socialism and Jewish Nationality. The Views of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz", in Soviet Jewish Affairs 20.1 Spring 1990 , pp. 47-55. 2 . The most important publications are an edition of "Selected Works": Pisma wybrane , 2 vols. Warsaw: Ksiazka i Wiedza, 1962 , an edition of Kelles-Krauz"s letters: Listy , 2 vols., ed. by Feliks Tych et al. Wroclaw: Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, 1984 , and a biography by Wieslaw Bienkowski: Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz. Zycie i dzielo Wroclaw: Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich, 1969 . 3 . "W kwestii narodowosci zydowskiej," in Pisma wybrane , Vol. 2, pp. 318-41. 4 . Allgemeyner Idisher Arbeyterbund in Lita, Poylen un Rusland General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia . 5 . Kelles-Krauz developed his arguments about the nation-state most extensively in "Niepodleglosc Polski a materialistyczne pojmowanie dziejow," in Pisma wybrane , Vol. 2, pp. 370-394. 6 . See his "Program narodowosciowy Socjalnej Demokracji Austriackiej a program PPS," in Pisma wybrane , Vol. 2, 275-296. 7 . Gyorgy Lukacs, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein: Studien uber marxistische Dialektik Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1923 . 8 . "He anticipated Anderson"s idea of the imagined community, Hobsbawm"s connection of modern nationalism to the process of inventing traditions, and Gellner"s argument that nationalism is a function of economic and social modernization. What is more, he united all three of these threads in a single body of work, eighty years before the publication of these three books in 1983" p. 251 .