East Is East? Polish Orientalisms in the Early Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT This article explores the significance of orientalism as a cultural phenomenon in Polish literature and culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Intervening in a long-standing debate about whether orientalism in Poland was an original phenomenon or a ‘derivative and imitative’ discourse, the article offers close readings of two cultural phenomena that show that the application of such binaries is overly reductive. Rather, orientalist inspirations in Poland were multi-layered: inspiration from western European orientalism mixed with Poland’s own historical ‘easternness’, especially in the heterogeneous contact zone of what is now Ukraine. Analysis of Edward Raczyński’s (1786–1845) 1821 account of his journey to Turkey, and of the life and cultural legend of Wacław Seweryn Rzewuski (1784–1831), shows that Ukraine was a site of overlapping orientalist projections in the Polish cultural imagination in the decades following the Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.