Bronisław Piłsudski (1866-1918) is an elusive figure. He pales, unjustifiably, in the looming shadow of his one-year-junior brother Józef, who passed into history as the creator and the long-serving Leader (Naczelnik) of the Polish nation-state. Bronisław Piłsudski was born into a Polish-speaking Lithuanian family of the nobility. At that time, his native land had been part of the Russian empire for almost a century, from the time of the partitions of Poland-Lithuania. His youth was typical. A Swiss governess gave him a good command of French and German, and he finished Russian-language primary and secondary education. His and Józef’s flirtation with Polish nationalism and socialism started in gymnasium, as was the case of other noble children gradually turned intelligentsia. Bronisław enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the Imperial University, St. Petersburg in 1886. Due to his ideological activities, he and Józef unwittingly and indirectly (it seems) became involved in the unsuccessful plot aimed at the assassination of Tsar Alexander III. In 1887 he was sentenced to a fifteen-year katorga (exile) on the prison island of Sakhalin, and Józef was exiled to Eastern Siberia until 1892.
The twelve letters of Bronisław included in this volume, letters discovered in the Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, Vilnius, are addressed to his father, sister and brothers. The majority of them span the period 1887-89. In his letters, Bronisław traces his progress from St. Petersburg to Sakhalin via Odessa, the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and Singapore, as well as his first three years in exile. Bronisław’s initial grief gives way to apologies to his father for not having followed his advice to steer clear out of conspiratorial work. Bronisław strives to understand his fate in the light of Christian thought but he soon remembers the concept of noblesse oblige. This dictum of the nobility, reformulated on the basis of Comte’s philosophy of positivism, meant for Polish-language intelligentsia and nobility the need to work rather than fighting for would-be independent Poland. Espousing this ethos, Bronisław endeavored first of all to not be lazy. During the oceanic transit to the island of his exile, he taught a young sailor how to read, and also conducted weather observations.
In his letters, Bronisław at first addressed his father with the respectful Вы. But the farther he went he more he used the more direct and familiar Ты. Thousands of kilometers away, he desperately tried to keep up with the life of his family. He described the minutiae of his life to them and attempted to inculcate his ‘lazy’ brothers with positivism. He agonized most of all from not knowing anything of Józef, not even his address. When Bronisław finally obtained information on the whereabouts of his beloved brother, they started exchanging letters. Unfortunately, these letters may have not yet been discovered, as they were not included in this publication, unlike letters from Bronisław’s other relatives.
During his exile, Bronisław wished to broaden his education and to remain useful to society. His father sent him books on astronomy, physics, biology, medicine and mathematics, more than he had even asked for, and Bronisław began to teach children of ex-inmates, also engaging in the agriculture of his penal village, in clerical work at the prison office, and in the running of the meteorological station. This information, which is not found in the letters, is provided by Inoue in his three papers, also included in the volume. Two of these papers were presented at the two international symposia devoted to B. Piłsudski and his ethnological research held at Sapporo and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in 1985 and 1991 respectively. The third paper was delivered by Inoue in 1997 at the American Museum of Natural History, New York.
In 1891, Bronisław met fellow state criminal Lev Yakovlevich Sternberg,^[1] who got him interested in ethnology. The two began field research among the native ethnic group of the Gilyak. Socialist-minded Bronisław could not merely observe their poverty and so taught them how to plant potatoes and to salt fish. He also had a talented Gilyak boy, Indyn, sent to a Vladivostok school. Indyn helped Bronisław translate some collected Gilyak oral material into Russian before the youth died of pneumonia in 1903.
After the 1896 amnesty, Bronisław was allowed to move to Vladivostok. He stayed there until 1903 and busied himself with the research work at the local museum. He also worked as the secretary of the Vladivostok branch of the Imperial Geographical Society, wrote for a newspaper, and pioneered Russian Far Eastern statistics, editing a bi-weekly publication on this subject. In 1902-05, Piłsudski headed the ethnographic expedition to study the Sakhalin ethnic groups of the Ainu and the Orok. He also ventured to Hokkaido. These research trips were financed by the newly founded Russian Committee for the Study of Central and East Asia, chaired by Wilhelm Radloff (Piłsudski’s one letter to him is included in this volume). Sternberg was instrumental in securing necessary funding, as he headed the committee’s two secretarial posts.
In addition to collecting a wealth of ethnographic material, complete with photos and 115 phonographic recordings on wax cylinders, Piłsudski also succumbed to his socialist urges and established two elementary schools for Ainu children. On top of that, he found a bit of happiness in the wake of his harsh fate as an exile. He befriended his landlord chief (kotan) Bafunke-Ainu (in Japanese, Aikichi Kimura,) and fell in love with his niece Chuhsamma (also known as Shinki and Shinkinchô), who died in 1936. She bore Piůsudski a son Sukezô (1903-71) and a daughter Kiyo (1905-1984). The commotion brought about by the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) and the 1905 Russian Revolution complicated Piłsudski’s personal and research life. Radloff did not, as he had promised, secure him a gratis railway ticket to St. Petersburg and Lithuania. Because of this, combined with his probable involvement in a strike and demonstration at Vladivostok, Piłsudski was forced to leave Russia for Japan in 1905. A fellow Pole and researcher, Wacław Sieroszewski, has written about these events^[2] so it is unfortunate that his pertinent writings were not included in the volume.
In 1906, Piłsudski set off from Japan to Seattle. Having crossed the United States, he reached Europe via the Atlantic Ocean. In 1907, he settled in the resort town of Zakopana, Galicia, Austria-Hungary, so as to stave off the deterioration of his health. He would never again see either his native Lithuania or his Ainu family. Unfortunately, Inoue does not provide any information about the life of Piłsudski’s wife and children or his possible epistolary and pecuniary links with them. Nor does he make it clear if Piłsudski married Chuhsamma in an Ainu or Christian manner, or if they were officially married at all.
As evidenced by Inoue’s article on Piłudski’s relationship with Sternberg and the included six letters Piłsudski wrote between 1907 and 1916 to the influential American anthropologist Franz Boas, his dream was to head another ethnographic expedition to Sakhalin. But this was not to be – his financial problems and failing personal life took precedence. His life partner Maria Żarnowska was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1909. To fight for her life and his health he sold his Gilyak materials to Sternberg and unsuccessfully attempted to secure a grant (via Boas) for the translation of his Ainu and Gilyak collection into Russian before passing it to an American research institution. Somewhat irritatingly, the reader does not learn what happened to Żarnowska, nor what Piłsudski’s relations were with his Polish family, in particular with his famous brother Józef. After the outbreak of World War I, Bronisław somehow moved to Switzerland, where he engaged in the compilation of a Polish encyclopedia in French at the Musee National Polonais (Polish National Museum). Perhaps Józef, or his example, was instrumental in redirecting Bronisław’s endeavors to the Polish national cause. Last, but not least, Inoue does not explain if Bronisław went to Paris to attend to some official matter or for hospitalization. He died in the French capital in 1918, and the causes of his untimely death are also not accounted for in this volume.
I am not sure how to treat Inoue’s volume. Standing on its own, it furnishes the reader with much fascinating material and information on the unduly unknown Eurasian scholar whose world renown was firmly established by Japanese, Russian and Polish scholars only in the wake of perestroika. But the book’s focus shifts somewhat strangely from Bronisław’s personal life in his youth to his research during his Sakhalin period, and to his personal-cum-political-cum-research preoccupations after his return to Europe. Perhaps the reader is to consider this volume as the first issue of the periodical-like Pilsudskiana de Sapporo. But even so, this does not justify the inclusion of conference papers verbatim with some infelicities explained and corrected in footnotes, or the presentation of some Russian-language letters of Piłsudski with English translation, while others remain in the original.
The explanation is most likely the ‘preprint’ character of this work, such that a review may facilitate the editor’s work on polishing this volume for final publication. If that is the case, then one glaring error in need of rectification is the misspelling of Piłsudski’s surname in the subtitle at page 11. This form of preprint has already proved beneficial for the publication of The Collected Works of Bronisław Piłsudski. The first two volumes of this work, which will be six volumes, were published in 1998 after having been thoroughly corrected while in their preprint form.^[3]
In his lifetime, Piłsudski managed to publish only one volume of his research.^[4] His namesake and fellow Pole Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942) born in Galicia, was more fortunate. Not only did he become the father of field anthropology, thanks to his Australian internment in the Micronesia as a citizen of an enemy power during World War I, but he saw most of his voluminous writings published in English during his lifetime. The scholarly stature of Piłsudski might have been comparable with that of Malinowski had he lived longer and settled in the well-financed and studious quiet of a British or American university far away from the immediate concerns of Polish nation-state building and post-war poverty in continental Europe.
Inoue’s fascination with Bronisław Piłsudski is a life-long one. To recover his rich and variegated legacy, this Japanese scholar has criss-crossed the whole of Eurasia in the last two decades. And this geographical complication is not the only one. Piłsudski read and wrote in Polish, French and German. In the course of his research he mastered some Ainu and Gilyak. He communicated his findings in the koines of Russian and English. His writings and research materials, preserved at various archives, and the commentaries on these writings are in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, Japanese and English. A prospective Pilsudskian scholar must be well-versed at least in half of these languages, which is not an easy task.
As a citizen of Poland, it was interesting for me to see that Piłsudski corresponded with his Polish-speaking family in Russian. Although I am no historian of the Russian Empire, I wonder if this was a sine qua non requirement of correspondence for those in exile, without fulfilling which exiles and their kin could not exchange any letters, as they would be unintelligible to censors. Another surprise was the relatively good conditions exiles enjoyed in comparison to the Soviet system of gulag camps. Inmates could obtain and read books, engage in scholarly activities, and travel around on official and personal errands. This would have been unthinkable in the prison system of any communist state. But at my communist school, it was Tsarist times that were presented as the epitome of abject oppressiveness.