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the coming spring
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2022-04-12 at 9:54 PM UTCthis is literally the greatest example of polish literature known to exist to man. Ive read this book and cried while in the ice center at adelanto. It is just so profound and from a diff time but at the same time a repeating time as what was described in the book is happening now in ukraine. The refugges a new country forming war etc.
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2022-04-12 at 10:01 PM UTCWHen I was reading this book I even told my lithuanian buddy in there that "I think I am reading the greatest novel Ive read in my entire life"
https://www.amazon.pl/Coming-Spring-Stefan-Zeromski/dp/9637326898The Coming Spring (Przedwiosnie), Zeromski's last novel, tells the story of Cezary Baryka, a young Pole who finds himself in Baku, Azerbaijan, then a predominantly Armenian city, as the Russian Revolution breaks out. He becomes embroiled in the chaos caused by the revolution, and barely escapes with his life. Then, he and his father set off on a horrendous journey west to reach Poland. His father dies en route, but Cezary makes it to the newly independent Poland. Cezary sees the suffering of the poor, yet his experiences in the newly formed Soviet Union make him suspicious of socialist and communist solutions. He is an outsider among both the gentry and the working classes, and he cannot find where he belongs. Furthermore, he has unsuccessful and tragic love relations. The novel ends when, despite his profound misgivings, he takes up political action on behalf of the poor.
Z· eromski The Coming Spring Central European University Press Budapest – New York Sales and information: ceupress@ceu.hu Website: http://www.ceupress.com One of the great masterpieces of European fiction of the 20th century, The Coming Spring tells the story of Cezary Baryka, a young Pole living in Baku, Azerbaijan, as the Russian Revolution breaks out. He becomes embroiled in the chaos caused by the revolution , and barely escapes with his life. Then he sets off on a horrendous journey west and makes it to the newly independent Poland. Here he struggles to find his place. He wants to help his country; he sees the suffering of the poor and the working classes, yet his experiences in the newly formed Soviet Union make him deeply suspicious of socialist and communist solutions. Żeromski paints a masterful portrait of the turmoil of the new country—the elation of independence sobered by the glaring social inequities found between classes. In rich, pithy, memorable language he describes both the hope and the agony of the times. His account of Polish society is deeply, painfully honest and brilliantly insightful. Stefan Żeromski (1864–1925) is universally acknowledged as the most outstanding Polish novelist of his generation. He was a writer with a strong social conscience, taking up the concerns of the poor and downtrodden. Yet he did so with a poet’s sensibility , and his novels, stories, and plays are superbly constructed works of art that constitute major accomplishments in European literature. In the 1920’s Żeromski was a leading contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature; his candidacy was supported by Joseph Conrad, who was a fervent admirer of his work.
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2022-04-12 at 10:02 PM UTCI am in warsaw right now where this novel ends in this fountain i visit constantly and think of the book I even have images of the fountain and particularly when i first ende dup here i took many.
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2022-04-12 at 10:06 PM UTC
Czaruś had just turned fourteen and graduated from the fourth class to the fifth when Seweryn Baryka was called up to serve as an officer in the reserve. War had broken out. Rapidly, in the space of a few days, the family idyll was shattered. Cezary found himself alone with his mother in a fatherless apartment.
Accompanying his father to the troop ship leaving for Astrakhan, he had felt no sorrow whatsoever. It was a novelty! He was occupied by a thousand trifling details—dates, names, and figures, in connection with his father’s donning the uniform of an officer. He packed his father’s magnificent yellow leather suitcase with its metal fittings, stamped monogram, and abundance of mysterious compartments within. He neither shared nor understood his mother’s desperate tears and sobbing, which lasted from morning till night.
It was only when his father was on board in the company of other officers, and he was left alone on shore with his mother, and the gangway was pulled away with a clatter —only then was Czaruś overcome by a terror he had never in his life known before. Under the influence of this feeling he stretched out his arms and started shouting like a true child. But the reassuring gestures C The Coming Spring 14 that his father’s white hands formed in the air calmed him as instantly as that youthful blind pain had struck. It would only be for a short time! Just for maneuvers! The war would be over soon.
Just a few weeks. Maybe a month. Two at the most. The Russian steamroller would flatten the enemies’ fields, crushing obstacles as if they were carrots or corn, and all would return to normal. That was what everyone was saying, and such an opinion Cezary too had inherited from his departing father. Returning home from the port with his mother, who was truly as silent as the grave, Cezary was already in a cheerful mood. He was happy about various things, above all the prospect of freedom. His father never ever punished him nor even scolded him; he would tell him off half-jokingly, gently making fun of him. Yet he possessed an unbreakable iron power over his son.
Despite his father’s mild-mannered smile, despite his polite suggestions and respectful advice, and his good-natured requests made during blandishments and games—no resistance was possible. These were canons and clauses of the will, imposed with a smile amid caresses. It was a despotic rule and an autocracy so firm that nothing, literally nothing, could overcome it. Now that iron band had loosened and fallen away of its own accord. The fearful panic in his mother’s eyes—“What will your father say?”—had disappeared. His father was gone from the apartment and from the world, and his absence said: “Do what you will!” This freedom delighted Czaruś. It terrified his mother. Houses of Glass 15 “What’s going to happen now?” she kept whispering as she wrung her hands. Cezary asked no such questions. He promised his mother he would be obedient, just as if his father were present in his study.
He had decided to behave, and reassured his mother with a thousand tender caresses. But deep down, his soul and body were bursting to cut loose. What he couldn’t obtain from his mother with willful caprices, he wheedled out of her by charm or by making a scene. Now he got his own way. He did what he felt like. He no longer perceived the boundaries that he had previously been forbidden to cross, and he threw himself left and right, backwards and forwards—so as to take a good look at everything that before had been proscribed. He spent entire days away from home getting up to mischief with his pals, playing games, having adventures and prowling about.
When the vacation ended he “attended” grammar school and as before he had French and German, English and Polish lessons at home; but now it was little more than a series of arguments , sometimes even fights. He locked horns with every one of his schoolteachers, started quarrels and conducted endless judicial proceedings, for he constantly experienced “injustices” and “wrongs” that, as a person of honor, he had to avenge in a manner that was both appropriate and recognized as such by the competent authorities, that is to say, his “old” chums in the fifth class. Games… -
2022-04-12 at 10:10 PM UTC
PART TWO Nawłoć ————— rriving at the very heart of Poland—in other words Warsaw, its capital—Cezary Baryka had found no houses of glass either in the city or on the way. He didn’t even dare ask anyone about them. He realized that before his death his late father had played a painful joke on him. Nevertheless—influenced perhaps by that so naive legend, or perhaps by its hero, “cousin Baryka”—Cezary decided to study medicine in Warsaw. He did not have his papers from Baku, but after a rather superficial examination he was admitted and began to attend lectures.
With great enthusiasm he cut up stiffs and studied osteology, chemistry, botany and so on. He got to know some of “the Poles” and took quite a liking to these new people, though they sometimes cut him to the quick with their “insincerity.” As concerned material things he was much helped by his late father’s acquaintance Mr. Szymon Gajowiec , a high-ranking official in the newly created Ministry of the Treasury, who gave him a temporary job in his office and arranged well-paying Russian A The Coming Spring 128 lessons for senior army officers from “Galicia.”1
This Mr. Gajowiec asked particularly about Cezary’s mother, whom he had known long long ago in the town of Siedlce. He had Cezary repeat every detail many times over, along with the story of all the vicissitudes she had suffered, and her death. Cezary told everything with especial thoroughness to this unknown man, while the latter listened to it all intently—more, with tears in his eyes, and once even, during an account of the last days of her torments, he wept bitterly.
Cezary could not figure out the reason for this—why this gentleman, who had not seen his mother for so many years, since she had left the country , was so concerned with her fate and so moved by it. But Mr. Gajowiec, a stiff and distinguished bureaucrat, confirmed bachelor, pedant, and stickler for discipline, explained it to him himself one day as they were talking one on one. He confessed in a calm and dispassionate manner, as if he were speaking of a financial matter, without a trace of affectation, or of false shame or false sentimentality, that long ago he had loved Cezary’s mother.
He had loved her alone in all his life. At the time he had been a poor young penpusher in the treasury office of the provincial government , and he could not compete with Cezary’s father, who arrived out of the blue from Russia, swathed in a cloud of success. She was given away to the best 1 Galicia was the southeastern region of the new Polish republic; it had formerly been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and so its inhabitants often did not know Russian.
Nawłoć 129 suitor—there was nothing odd about that…Who, what parents, could have rejected such a match? She left as a young lady, and now her name was all that was left of her. Mr. Gajowiec assured Cezary baldly that he had never so much as shaken her hand, that he had never expressed his feelings to her in words. Once…there had been a letter…but it was irrelevant and had had no influence on her decision. And so there was nothing wrong with the fact that he was now speaking to her son about this, since she herself was gone. Even his rival—God have mercy!—was gone.
He alone, Cezary, was left, the shadow and likeness of “Miss Jadwiga”; his eyes were the very image of his mother’s. Mr. Gajowiec was glad to talk with Cezary. They often secreted themselves alone together and spent hours recalling Cezary’s late mother. There was not a detail, a variant of a story, or an anecdote concerning her that did not interest the older man. There was not one topic connected with her that would have bored him.
Cezary too found a particular pleasure in these conversations about his mother. It sometimes seemed to him that just like Mr. Gajowiec, he saw her young, beautiful , and happy, that he was getting to know her as Miss Jadwiga, Miss Jadzia, with whom a certain stripling from a government office was madly, insanely in love, and kept telling her so with his dreamy eyes. This was a new image of his mother, a new form she was assuming, a new… -
2022-04-12 at 10:15 PM UTC
325 PART THREE The Wind from the East pon his return to Warsaw Cezary Baryka enrolled once more in his medical studies and took up residence, at his own invitation, in the room of one of his fellow students, a certain Buławnik. This Bu- ławnik came from a line of innkeepers or small-town profiteers, as a result of which he was always “in the money.” He lived, however, in a remote and entirely jedi neighborhood, on Miła Street, in a dingy, crumbling apartment building whose stairs were so filthy, and the walls of whose entranceway were so blackened by the fumes of gas lamps, that it would have required a truly angelic goodness of heart to look upon them without gnashing one’s teeth.
The room was on the fourth floor of this peeling ruin. Buławnik’s residence was accessed through the apartment of a sizeable number of rather malodorous and unkempt old ladies. On entering his room one was immediately struck by a leaky corner in the ceiling and an unwholesome smell rising from beneath the floor. Upon making inquiries with the caretaker, alternatively the concierge, about this matter, Cezary heard the following declaration: “Of course there’s a leak—it’s hardly surprising when there’s a whopping great hole in the ceiling right there in U The Coming Spring 326 the corner.
It’s so big a sheep could crawl through it into the attic.” “Why is there a whopping great hole? The whole point of having a roof is so there won’t be holes that sheep can crawl through into the attic.” “Sir!” the caretaker, alternatively the concierge, said in an ironic tone. “That’s all well and good, but these days there are more important things to worry about than holes in the roof. You’ll just have to live there and make do.”
“I understand, sir. But there’s also an unpleasant smell coming up from the under the floor. What do you think’s causing that?” “There’s a smell from the floor because it’s a gable wall. The beam’s got dry rot and the joists too. It’s no surprise that there’s dry rot, since it’s a gable wall, especially if you take into consideration the fact that it’s a corner room too.” Having received this explanation Cezary, instructed and fortified in spirit, ceased worrying about anything. He lived there and made do. But he did not like the room. Perhaps ten years before the Great War it had been painted the color of tomato soup. It was small, uncomfortable, and excessively draughty.
What blew from the window and door, moreover, was not clean air but the smell of certain indispensable toilets which were located far down on the ground floor, it was true, but right underneath the window of the room. Furthermore, just beyond the outside wall there was the tin chimney of a bakery, which blasted constant streams of dullcolored smoke into the students’ window. At night there The Wind from the East 327 could be heard the interminable clatter of bread carts being pushed by hand from where the ovens were, making the thin if long-established walls tremble as though in a fever.
In a word, it was not a pleasant place. And Buławnik was not a pleasant roommate—he was an egotist and miser by day, and a master of sarcasm and vulgarity in the evening, while in the night he snored enough for ten men. But Baryka had no choice. He had to put up with this arrangement with his fellow student, since his own pockets were empty. Immediately after moving in he took from his suitcase the tail coat and accessories that had been a gift in friendship from Hipolit Wielosławski, and decided to sell this relic, this symbol of life at Nawłoć—this memento.
On the pretext of assessing the value of the outfit , Cezary gazed intently at the curious garment and, in secret from the coarse and insensitive Buławnik, shed a final tear. The coat still smelled of “Laura’s” perfume. Oh, how painful that scent was now! It was truly as if the devil were taking revenge with this faint, invisible, yet so powerful means of recalling former pleasures. Indistinctly, vaguely, as if in a dream, Baryka was beginning to understand that certain unimaginable scales were at that moment weighing the faded scent of Laura’s perfume against…