Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/81

Rh In the same way the leading Russian actress declined to go to Warsaw with the imperial troupe, and declared she would not act there until she might do so in Polish. But such cases are exceptional.

On the other hand, there are incidents of the very opposite description, which a Polish child daily witnesses and hears discussed in his home. Hatred of the Muscovite (Moskal) becomes a part of his nature.

He is finally sent to school, that is, he has to be given up to the Russian state, to Russian teachers. In his own home his mother has always dressed him in the Polish national costume, which is not allowed in the street. He has lived with picture-books and paintings which have shown him scenes of the past history of Poland, of the revolutions of this century, of the march of the exiles to Siberia; he knows the career of Poland minutely. In school the boy is dressed in Russian uniform, is addressed only in Russian, is never allowed to speak a single word that is not Russian, never hears anything about Poland or Polish literature, or if it is mentioned at all, it is spoken of as something prohibited, evil. He learns here that he is Russian, and nothing else than Russian. What confusion in the child's soul! The boy is compelled to be a hypocrite, to tell lies. The seeds of defiance and self-restraint, or of falsehood and flattery, are planted in his soul. Desperate questions as to whether resistance is of any use, whether justice exists, necessarily arise.

The schools are bad. The circumstance that the whole instruction is given in a foreign language, and that an inordinate stress is laid upon the acquirement of it; the dislike and constraint, which are the result thereof; lastly, the habit of looking on the teacher as a foreigner and an enemy have a great effect in diminishing the result. There is a minority of the students who understand French, and speak it well; a certain number understand and speak the language of the frontier—German; but the majority are barely able to read foreign books, and many do not understand a simple question in French or German. Those who are well-to-do go to foreign lands to study; if they cannot