Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/97



The present War has brought into prominence the name of Poland and the fact of the existence of the Polish nation, a fact which during the last two generations had been gradually sinking into oblivion. During the period preceding the outbreak of the War the people of this country would occasionally meet with some Polish name; would read a novel by Sienkiewicz, the author of Quo Vadis; would go with pleasure to Paderewski's concerts and enjoy his interpretation of Chopin's Polish music. To many of them these things did not even suggest the fact that somewhere, in a distant part of Europe, there existed a national life, a civilisation, whose literary and artistic products thus reached them in fragments. They were like fishermen who, having caught a fish close to the surface of the sea, were satisfied with it and did not even ask themselves what sort of life it was beneath the surface that had produced the specimen they caught. In the years just prior to the War the papers brought them occasional news about a desperate struggle for existence going on in German Poland, about the unheard-of measures