And this inevitably engendered a tendency to try and come up with supposed moments of “what could have been” if somebody had done something else, you know – if only Jan Sobieski had managed to found a dynasty, and limit the liberum veto, everything would have been alright, that kind of thing.īeing outside Poland meant that one was just as much exposed to a sense of being besieged, because Western historians were not interested in Polish history, and as I said, people regarded Poland as a gloomy place inhabited by possibly charming but pretty thick primitives, who were, you know, Jew bashers (was it Keynes who said that Poland’s only industry was Jew-baiting?). Their entire view of Polish history was necessarily one of trying to work out where it had all gone wrong, and why it had gone wrong. They were basically writing from within the walls of a besieged fortress. Polish historians in Poland were blissfully unaware of that. Because throughout the middle of the 20th century, certainly in the post-war decades, and really up until about Solidarity, the general view of Western intellectuals was that Poles were in some unspecified way reactionary, crypto-fascists.

Dealing with the history of Poland – certainly until very recently – was almost inevitably an emotional thing, because Polish history had become a political battleground from the 19th century onwards, both in nationalist terms i.e in trying to prove that Poles had not been as hopeless as the Germans or even English and French historiography would have one believe on the one hand, but also ideologically. KP: The spy Andrzej Kowerski/Andrew Kennedy once made the ironic remark that the wartime emigration was a positive thing as it provided “a good mix of Polish fantasy and British phlegm.” In what respects was growing up outside Poland a help or a hindrance to you as a historian of Central Europe?ĪZ: A huge help. He is married to the painter Emma Sergeant. This spring he published Poland: A History, a reworked and extended take on his classic The Polish Way. His first book, a biography of Chopin, was published in 1979, and he has since penned many acclaimed works, including the bestselling 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. He is chairman of the Czartoryski Foundation, which, together with the National Museum, administers Krakow’s Museum of the Czartoryski Princes. Although raised amongst post-war émigrés in London, historian Adam Zamoyski now divides his time between England and Poland.

The Polish Way by Adam Zamoyski