Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/32

20 Besides the ineffective censorship already spoken of there is one which is effective. The weekly newspaper, Prawda (Truth), the most progressive newspaper in Poland, the organ of the Positivists, has 3400 lines. It has happened that for a single number 7000 lines have been erased before the paper was published. The censor seems to be so capricious that it is impossible to foresee what will be allowed. The editor, the celebrated author, Alexander Svientochowski, writes as if there were no censor, and as an editor he cannot send his articles to any other paper.

The supervision of everything written would seem at least to ensure that the writers would escape punishment; for since nothing can be printed unless it has been read and approved, it would seem impossible to do wrong as an author. Nevertheless, young authors are to be met with who have repeatedly suffered a punishment of from three to five months' imprisonment in the interior of Russia; they were punished for their intentions, for what was struck out, or rather, they do not certainly know what they were punished for, since they are struck at not by a law, but by a police regulation.

The fact is the government does not need a law to attain its end; it has at its command what is better, the administrative way, and this administrative way means, as a rule, Siberia.

I have named the word which is in the air in Warsaw, the spectre which broods over the city like a nightmare, the threat which lurks about every man's door, the memory of which is to be read in the faces of so many men and women.

The first lady I took in to dinner on the first day of my stay in Warsaw—a beautiful, elegant woman with a Mona-Lisa smile, and something proud in her bearing—spent three years in the mines of Siberia. She had carried a letter during the revolt.

The next evening in a not very large room, more than two hundred years of Siberia were collected. There were not a few men who had spent from 1863-83 there, if we reckon the time it took for them to go on foot; this takes more or less time according to the situation of the place