The Polish Review
Library of Polish Classics
Aleksander Fredro
Topsy Turvy Talk,
being the Napoleonic Memoirs of Count Aleksander Fredro
Translated by Harold B. Segel
New York
208/30 Press
2010
208/30 Press is an imprint of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, Inc., a tax-exempt and non-profit educational and academic organization with headquarters in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan.
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ISBN: 978-1-930205-05-5
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CONTENTS
Introduction by Harold B. Segel
Topsy-Turvy Talk
INTRODUCTION
For all the whimsicality of the title, Aleksander Fredro’s book of memoirs, Topsy Turvy Talk, is an acknowledged masterpiece of Polish prose. Written by the author to this day considered Poland’s greatest comic dramatist, Topsy Turvy Talk has long been overshadowed by such perennial favorites of Polish theatergoers as Fredro’s Ladies and Hussars (Damy i huzary), Maidens’ Vows (Śluby panieńskie), and The Vengeance (Zemsta). Yet the memoirs merit serious attention not only for what they reveal of the life of a major Slavic writer, but also for the personal vision of the Napoleonic era that unfolds in them.
Before his literary career was launched in the late teens of the nineteenth century, Fredro had already distinguished himself in another area of human endeavor: war. When still a boy, he marched off in pursuit of glory to one of the grandest adventures in European history, the Napoleonic campaigns. After joining the sizeable Polish army that fought for Napoleon under the leadership of that gallant soldier, Prince Józef Poniatowski, Fredro came to know war at first hand in nearly every major campaign of 1812, 1813, and 1814. He became a member of the general staff of the Grand Armée and was decorated for heroism both by his own country and by France.
In the aftermath of the defeat in Russia, Fredro experienced all the havoc of the retreat of Napoleon’s once proud army. Succumbing to typhus, he was forced to lag behind and fell captive to the Russians in Lithuania. He was imprisoned in Wilno, but when his health improved he managed to escape and make his way back to his estate in the Austrian-dominated province of Galicia. With his strength restored, he rejoined the Polish army of Poniatowski, fought in the battles of Hanau, Leipzig, and Dresden, and returned with what was left of Napoleon’s army to France, to fight further at Montereau and elsewhere until the final collapse of the Emperor and the transfer of the remnants of the Polish army to Russian authority at St. Denis in 1814.
Topsy Turvy Talk is principally an account of those experiences, an intimate glimpse of the glory and ignominy of the Polish stake in Napoleon’s grand design for Europe. But the account is not one of a professional historian, chronicler, or diary writer. It is a highly personal and subjective record of certain memories, committed to paper a good thirty years after the events. The author’s memory is still strikingly sharp, but his attitude toward the past clearly reflects the experiences of the intervening years. When he undertook the writing of Topsy Turvy Talk Fredro had no thought of preparing a detailed account of the campaigns of Napoleon in which he himself participated. The act of writing his memoirs was instead a refreshing return on the wings of memory to the happier, more carefree days of his childhood and youth. Recollection of the early years on the family estate of Beńkowa Wisznia and the many and varied experiences of the war years held out the promise of a refuge for Fredro at a time in his career when he had need of one. For that reason, he chose to evoke primarily the memoirs dearest to him, memories that could again bring pleasure.
In the light of this we can appreciate why in writing of the battles in which he participated Fredro was not drawn to the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of brave men dying for a cause he saw as hopeless, but to the more whimsical and ludicrous sides of the campaigns. By making incidental, marginal, and even trivial events the central focus of Topsy Turvy Talk — rather than the actual battles — Fredro may have denied his memoirs any great value as historical commentary. But it was in this way that he infused his work with the irony and humor that have made it one of the more special prose works in the history of Polish literature. Fredro was, after all, a literary artist; Topsy Turvy Talk is no less impressive a testimony of this than his comedies. In writing of bygone days, Fredro sought to leave behind not only a record of a past dear to him, but a work of true literary worth. Topsy Turvy Talk must, therefore, be read primarily as a piece of literary art. Before examining it as such, let us consider first the circumstances under which it came to be written.
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No definitive chronology for Topsy Turvy Talk has yet been established. We know only that the work was composed some time between 1842 and 1848. This was a period when Fredro’s great comedies were behind him and he had temporarily abandoned dramatic writing. The causes for this withdrawal from public literary activity can be traced to certain events of his life between 1835, when his last important comedy — The Life Annuity (Dożywocie) — was written, and 1842, when he completely broke off playwriting and turned instead to the memoirs that were to be known as Topsy Turvy Talk. In 1835, the Polish Romantic poet, critic, and revolutionary, Seweryn Goszczyński bitterly attacked Fredro for his “slavish imitation” of foreign, especially French, comedy and his apparent lack of interest in Polish national problems. This was a time, after all, when Polish romanticism was at the peak of its development, some four years after the collapse of the November Insurrection of 1830. In the wake of the harsh suppression of the uprising by the Russians, thousands of Poles emigrated to the West and freedom. A new center of Polish intellectual and cultural life took shape in Paris which came to be the capital also of the so-called Great Emigration. The émigrés saw themselves as the spirit of the Polish nation and sought ways of liberating their country almost as soon as they reached foreign soil. Belief in the future of an independent Poland and their own central role in achieving this national liberation became the foundation on which their collective existence rested. The leading Polish Romantic poets, who were themselves now émigrés, attempted to extend spiritual sustenance to their fellow émigrés by making the emigration, its dangers, hopes, and aspirations, the principal subjects of their works. Engagement in the national struggle came to be regarded as the essential quality of a literary work. When it was found to be negligible, or absent entirely, public recognition was withheld.
The case of Fredro was quite different. He returned to Poland after the final defeat of Napoleon and tried to make a new life for himself by managing the family estate and finding pleasurable diversion in writing plays, at first under the spell of the theatrical life of Paris. The theatres of the French capital had left a lasting impression on the young Polish officer before his return to Poland and represented, to all intents and purposes, his first meaningful contact with the stage. The November Insurrection erupted in Russian Poland. The Fredro estate at Beńkowa Wisznia was far away to the south in Galicia, that part of the old Polish Commonwealth that had fallen to Austria in the Partitions. Fredro himself played no active role in the Insurrection. Even had he wanted to, it would have been difficult for him to cross the border from Austria into Russian Poland. Apart from the hardship involved in reaching Warsaw, Fredro was not enthusiastic about the rebellion. Certainly, he sympathized with its goal of ridding part of Poland of Russian domination, but he saw little hope for its success. Yet his lack of enthusiasm did not deter him from serving on committees active in providing money and material to the revolutionaries.
Because of the severity of the Austrian censorship, Fredro — as any writer in Galician Poland of the period — was limited in his choice of literary subjects. Obviously, the Austrian authorities would not have permitted the publication of any Polish literary work that fostered Polish patriotism or championed the cause of Polish liberty. Censorship was one reason why the works of Fredro’s most brilliant period as a dramatist from 1831 to 1835 are relatively free of any manifest concern with Polish politics. Moreover, Fredro possessed a genuine comic talent and sought as the vehicle for this talent comedies dealing, as do all great comedies, with the foibles, incongruities, and absurdities of human behavior. He was in this sense very much a classical comic writer. To question his patriotism, however, was to do him a disservice in the extreme. And this is precisely what Goszczyński did in 1835 in his article “Nowa epoka w poezji polskiej” (“The New Epoch in Polish Poetry”).
Although ostensibly on literary grounds, the attack was, in fact, politically motivated. In his daring revolutionary schemes to liberate the Polish province of Galicia from Austrian control, Goszczyński counted on rallying the support of the more influential members of the Galician Polish szlachta or gentry. This brought him into contact with Fredro who besides being one of the most prominent literary personalities in contemporary Galicia was also active in local and regional politics. Fredro, however, was cool to Goszczyński’s plans, seeing little possibility for their successful realization. He may also have been offended by Goszczyński’s revolutionary ardor. Angered by this lack of support, Goszczyński vented his wrath by denouncing Fredro as a writer. Although shocked by the attack, Fredro did not at once withdraw from further active participation in the literary life of Galicia. The poison of Goszczyński’s pamphlet did infect, however, a number of the younger pro-revolutionary members of the literary community of Lwów, the major cultural center of Galicia at the time. Seeing Fredro as a reactionary squire whose conservatism and selfishness could not permit him an active identification with the struggle for Polish national independence, they turned their backs on him. The fact that Fredro had fought on the field of battle in the name of a free Poland in some of the bloodiest campaigns of the Napoleonic wars was forgotten. Further demonstrations of hostility against the dramatist erupted culminating in the vicious and wholly unwarranted assault leveled in 1842 by (it is generally agreed now) the Lvovian critic Leszek Dunin-Borkowski. This was the final blow. A proud man, Fredro expressed his dismay at the harassment to which he saw himself unjustly subjected by terminating his professional literary career. For the remaining years of his long life not a single new comedy bearing his name graced a Polish stage. These years of silence were not by any means unproductive from a literary point of view. Before 1848, he began Topsy Turvy Talk and about 1854 returned to playwriting. However, the works produced in this later period of Fredro’s life were published only after his death.
It was in this mood of resentment and anger over what he considered the gross injustice of the attacks against him and the misunderstanding to which he attributed them that Fredro turned for solace to the quiet pleasures of family life and the recollection of a past dear to him for its colorful adventures and the warmth of close personal attachments and associations. Whether Fredro ever intended publishing his memoirs is a matter for speculation. There is some reason to believe that despite the interest he took in the composition of Topsy Turvy Talk he regarded the memoirs as just a family possession and nothing he cared too much about putting on public view. He was prevailed upon, however, to permit his son, Jan Aleksander, to prepare them for publication after his death. Fredro died in 1876. The following year Topsy Turvy Talk was first published in the Warsaw Gazeta Polska (Polish Gazette). Three years later, in 1880, it was incorporated into a new edition of Fredro’s collected works as Volume XI. There were two versions of the memoirs for this edition: one complete, in accordance with the author’s original manuscript, the other censored for Polish readers in Russian Poland.
In 1917, a new edition of Topsy Turvy Talk with an introduction by the historian of Polish literature, Adam Grzymała-Siedlecki, was issued in Warsaw by the venerable publishing house of Gebethner and Wolff. It was followed in 1922 by an illustrated edition with notes by Henryk Mościcki. Since then, two new editions of the work have appeared; in1949, the Mościcki edition was republished with an excellent afterword by the distinguished critic and literary historian Wacław Borowy, and in 1957, the illustrated Mościcki edition of 1922 was reissued with an updated new introduction by Grzymała-Siedlecki.
Topsy Turvy Talk first began to attract serious attention only after the publication of the Gebethner and Wolff edition of 1917. Generally speaking, critics were slow in appreciating the true literary significance of the work. Two of the earliest commentators on the memoirs, Adam Grzymała-Siedlecki and the Polish literary historian Ignacy Chrzanowski (the author of a monograph on Fredro’s comedies in 1917) did not fail to recognize the considerable narrative talent displayed by the author of Topsy Turvy Talk or to appreciate the humor and verve of the work. Yet the loose composition of the memoirs, their apparent “shapelessness” seemed a major flaw to them. To other critics such as Tadeusz Sinko, Adam Skałkowski, and Władysław Prokesch, this looseness of structure and the many digressions in which the work abounds were among its most attractive features, something that contributed very much to the charm of Topsy Turvy Talk and not at all a weakness of structure. It was only with the appearance of Wacław Borowy’s afterword to the 1949 edition of Topsy Turvy Talk that the structure of the memoirs was put in its proper historico-literary frame. Borowy’s great service lay in demonstrating quite convincingly that the loose, seemingly disjointed structure of the work was nothing unintentional or accidental. On the contrary, Fredro was proceeding according to a very definite literary plan, one that he had acquired basically from the author of The Life and Thoughts of Tristram Shandy (1760-67) and A Sentimental Journey Through France and I t a l y (1768). Laurence Sterne’s carefree narrative style — the heart of which was the digression — had a fair number of imitators throughout Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Denis Diderot (1713-84) was one in his Jacques le fataliste published posthumously in 1796; Xavier de Maistre (1763-1852) another, in Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794); so was the Russian Decembrist author Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinsky (1797-1837) in his Poezdka v Revel (A Journey to Revel, 1821), written in the form of letters. And so, there is little doubt, was Fredro. Borowy is of the opinion that Fredro had a direct knowledge of at least A Sentimental Journey (a Polish translation of it appeared in 1817). Even had he not known any of Sterne’s works at first hand, Fredro had ample opportunity to become familiar with Sterne’s technique in such Polish “Sternian” novels as Fryderyk Skarbek’s Podróż bez celu (Journey without a Goal, 1824-25), describing a journey to Silesia and Germany, and Pan Antoni (Mister Anthony, 1824) with typographical eccentricities reminiscent of Sterne, and Józef Ignacy Kraszewski‘s Podróż po mojej szkatulce (A Journey through My Trunk).
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The loose narrative structure of Fredro’s Topsy Turvy Talk with its many digressions and asides points clearly to Sterne’s influence. Through a complex pattern of interlaced narrative threads Fredro has woven a number of smaller humorous tales, anecdotes, and reflections on social, political, and military matters, lyrical digressions reflecting a poetically sensitive appreciation of nature, and emotional outbursts centered almost entirely on the writer’s deep resentment over the attacks that led to his rupture with the Galician Polish literary world. At one point in Topsy Turvy Talk Fredro jocularly discusses the plan with which he embarked on the writing of the work:
I would have avoided many misunderstandings had I begun, as God ordered me, from the beginning. For example: There was a Mister and Mrs... They had a son, whom they named Aleksander… Or also: I was born in Surochów, in the Przemysl area, the son of Jacek and Maria Fredro. When? I don’t know exactly because at that time the parish priest officiated wet but wrote dry... Yes, it certainly would have been better to have begun this way, but it didn’t turn out like that.
This deliberate eschewal of conventional chronological order may also have been prompted for another reason which has nothing specially to do with Sterne. Throughout his memoirs Fredro assumes the pose of an old man harmlessly entertaining himself with his recollection of events long since passed. He says, at various places:
I shall relate what happened since I have no other purpose here but to ramble on topsy turvy just to keep myself amused, like a child with a shuttlecock, with the recollection of bygone years — to throw out little pictures which each person more or less stores up in the piggybank of his memory.
Hear me out, for I’m weaving my story topsy turvy, just as an old person is wont to do, but I shall not repeat to you today what I related yesterday.
Now, having seated myself by the fireplace, I chat willingly about the Emperor Napoleon. … The young people listen to me; I spin tales and weary others before I do myself.
I shall then let these recollections rest in peace… Let’s go back to Trześnia. And I don’t know why there… But they say a person who’s getting gray likes to spin tales.
In view of the fact that Fredro began Topsy Turvy Talk before 1848, i.e., before his middle fifties, there can be no doubt that the pose of an old man casually spinning tales in fits and starts, in a topsy turvy manner, was merely a literary device. To maintain the consistency of this posture and the tone of the entire work Fredro follows a pattern of reverse chronological order in his narrative. Thus, the memoirs begin with an account of the battle of Montereau in February, 1814, which was the last, or one of the last, engagements Fredro participated in personally. Only after reviewing his military experiences retrogressively (from the battle of Montereau and the St. Denis episode of 1814 to his entry into the Polish army under Poniatowski in 1809) does Fredro pass to his childhood and adolescent years. These make up the final part of the memoirs and cover the period from his birth in 1793 to1809.
Although the pose of an elderly gentleman spinning stories is not derived from Sterne, the overall pattern of loose narrative structure in Topsy Turvy Talk and the idea of unconventional chronology are. Fredro also took from Sterne the direct address to the reader as a way of maintaining a familiar chatty style throughout his work; after all, as Sterne himself said: “Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is), is but a different name for conversation”:
I was saying that the kind reader quite rightly concludes that I was always near the Emperor… For that reason I shall allow myself to make a few explanations in the hope that if they will not interest you, then certainly you will be polite enough to hear them patiently.
What staff means, in French etat major, I am sure you know without any doubt, my dear sir.
Perhaps you expect me to tell you something about myself now — but no, that goes beyond my strength.
Now permit me to ask you, distinguished citizen, if you ever stood a whole day in a field in a winter wind without a cloak, fox-fur cap, or even a coat?
My dear sir, leave your own head when you go out into the world and buy yourself another one, made out of copper, well-worn… Believe me, you won’t come out badly that way.
Allow me, ladies and gentlemen, to interrupt my tale and recall a small, sufficiently amusing incident of which I was a witness.
You have no doubt imagined, my dear readers, from more than one place in my story that I liked to sleep.
Certainly it’s only out of politeness, my dear ladies and gentlemen, that you don’t ask me for what reason I was made an officer.
I must ask you to recall what the state of affairs was…
I ask you to recall (for I won’t repeat it)...
Ah, hide-and-seek! Who of you never played hide-and-seek?
But since we’re talking about horses, tell me, my dear parson, or you, kind doctor, were you ever carried by a steed which was champing his bit and racing away?… No? — Never? — A pity, for you’d have to admit unfailingly that even if the most brilliant man of the old or the new days… sat on a runaway horse he’d have to have the stupidest expression on his face, as 1’ve had more than once and especially one time in Warsaw.
Speaking of the digressions of Tristram Shandy, Sterne says on two occasions in the twenty-second chapter of Volume I:
Digressions, incontestable, are the sunshine; — they are the life, the soul of reading; — take them out of this book, for instance, — you might as well take the book along with them; — one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer, — he steps forth like a bridegroom, — bids All hail, brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.
I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of it with such intersections, and have so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going; and, what’s more, it shall be kept a-going these forty years, if it pleases the fountain of health to bless me so long with life and good spirits.
To best appreciate the extent to which Fredro accepted Sterne’s views on digressions as valid for his own work, let us follow the account of the battle of Montereau with which Topsy Turvy Talk in fact begins. After an opening paragraph about Napoleon which establishes the irony informing a good part of Topsy Turvy Talk Fredro passes quickly to his recollections of the Montereau engagement. These are soon interrupted by a small digression about his horse and cloak, after which he again resumes his account of the battle. This is again interrupted by the introduction of the figure of his servant, Onufry, and an emotional digression on the meaning of truth. After this he returns not to the theme of the battle but to Onufry and a humorous episode in which he got involved once in Dresden. Then he returns momentarily to the subject of Montereau beginning with the threat Napoleon is supposed to have shouted somewhere once in anger: “If I had two Vandammes, I’d order one hung.” Almost as soon as he picks up the Montereau thread again, he drops it to digress about his proximity to Napoleon on certain occasions. This leads into a digression about the staffs of Napoleon and Marshal Berthier, after which he takes up a new theme, the battle of Leipzig. From here he passes to the end of the French campaign in 1814 and the transfer of the Polish forces to Tsar Aleksander I at St. Denis the same year. After a number of digressions, among the most important of which are an account of the little good that Napoleon’s presence was for him personally during the campaigns and his imprisonment by the Russians in Wilno in 1812 on the retreat of the Grand Armée, he returns only considerably later to the battle of Montereau. This is signaled by the charmingly casual remark: “Yesterday we were probably in Montereau.” The Montereau theme is shortly abandoned once more to make way for the amusing episode of the Queen of Saxony, an account of his difficulties with stragglers over lodgings, the story of the abbé of Perthe who spoke in verse, general remarks about the French cavalry, the tale of his comrade’s discovery of a corpse in a deserted house, and the incident with the Cossacks in Michery. Fredro returns again to Montereau with the section beginning:
Now permit me to ask you, distinguished citizen, if you ever stood a whole day in a field in a winter wind without a cloak, fox-fur cap, or even a coat? — No: The better for you, but the worse for me since you will not comprehend the beneficent feeling with which in Montereau, the eighteen hundred and fourteenth year after the birth of Jesus Christ, around six in the evening, I unbuckled my sword, removed my uniform, and sat down beside a mighty fire that shot with coal and licked with flame the broad palate of a fireplace.
Fredro remains with the Montereau theme somewhat longer than previously as he describes his dangerous mission to Moret and Fontainebleau, part of which he made by boat along the Seine River through enemy territory. His thoughts while on the river journey provide a new pretext for digressions which take him back to the years 1809 and 1812 and the humorous though embarrassing episode of the Sokal parish priest, the organization of the Polish army in the time of Kościuszko, the campaign of 1809, the November Insurrection of 1830, his own advance in rank in Poniatowski’s army, and his duties as a staff officer. The resumption of his account of the boat trip on the Seine — a part of the Montereau narrative — is marked by an anecdote arising from his consideration of the Polish confusion of the name Seine with that of San, a considerably less significant waterway in Poland which once upon a time carried grain from Nielipkowice to Gdańsk (Danzig). Fredro maintains the Montereau narrative with some consistency for another seven or so pages (in the original Polish) with two major digressive interruptions: one concerning the French guard’s call for identification “Qui Vive?” and the other on the necessity for better saddling and shoeing of cavalry horses in wartime. By the time the Montereau material has been exhausted, and the theme completely dropped, two thirds of the memoirs have been covered.
Topsy Turvy Talk reminds one of Sterne not only because of its structure but because of its vividness and realism. Like Sterne, Fredro achieves this much of the time through a masterly use of physical detail. We can observe the technique at work at the very beginning of the memoirs in the introductory description of Napoleon on horseback in February 1814. The trifle is also no less important to Fredro than it was to Sterne. Fredro lavishes a lengthy analysis, for example, on the ways a soldier on duty might pronounce Qui vive! and the different interpretations possible. The tiny drop that forms on the end of a cold French nose is another one of those trifles Fredro managed to exploit in Sternian fashion to the fullest. Jak się masz? (How are you?) — that common Polish greeting — was the starting point for another disquisition. And there are many others as, for example, the origin of the epithet Gelbfüssler (yellow-feet) for the citizens of Gotha, and the author’s own white cloak, a trifle elevated to the status of a minor narrative thread in the memoirs.
This enhanced role of the trifle goes beyond merely a technique of style. For Fredro, as for Sterne, it is a way of expressing an attitude toward life itself. The trifling detail is often enhanced with a seriousness beyond all proportion and, conversely, in dealing with serious, weighty matters both authors frequently effect a jocular, mocking, irreverent tone. This “solemnicizing” of the insignificant and devaluation of the grave, the ironic juxtaposition of the high and the low, the serious and the frivolous, become a way of demonstrating the belief shared by both authors that there is nothing so unimportant that it has no importance and nothing so great that it has no light side to it. As Joseph Conrad expressed it in A Personal Record (1912), a work that reminds one of and in fact could have been inspired, to a certain extent, by Topsy Turvy Talk:
And then — it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon.
Apart from expressing this Weltanschauung, the trifle is also used in Topsy Turvy Talk toward a specific ideological goal — the debunking of the Polish Napoleonic hero myth. Before considering this aspect of Fredro’s memoirs, let us first sum up Sterne’s contribution to Topsy Turvy Talk.
From Sterne — whether directly or indirectly — Fredro borrowed the idea of the loose narrative structure broken up by a large number of digressions of one sort or another. The reverse chronological order of Topsy Turvy Talk represents, however, Fredro’s original use of the Sternian pattern. Fredro, moreover, assumes the pose, as we remarked earlier, of an old man rummaging about his memory and spinning his story in a careless, haphazard fashion. This serves as his rationale for the seemingly shapeless structure of Topsy Turvy Talk. Both authors strive for an informal, chatty style and use the device of the author’s direct address to his reader as a means toward this end. Some of the digressions and asides in Sterne’s works and Topsy Turvy Talk are devoted to literary critics. But with Fredro it was not just a matter of defending himself against adverse criticism, as in Sterne’s case, but of venting his despair and anger over the vicious assaults leveled against him in the name of literature but rooted, in fact, in political differences more than literary. Although Fredro borrowed the digressive structure of Topsy Turvy Talk from Sterne, his memoirs are free of any of Sterne’s structural and typographic idiosyncrasies. Topsy Turvy Talk is not broken up into tiny chapters nor are there any blank sections, graphs, or black pages. This does not mean that the memoirs are divided conventionally into chapters of more or less the same length. Quite the opposite of Shandy or Sentimental Journey, Topsy Turvy Talk has no divisions at all. It is one long, uninterrupted narrative. Yet both Sterne and Fredro may have started from the same point, and that was to demonstrate a desire to break out of the bounds of the traditional structure of novel and memoir.
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As we have seen, Topsy Turvy Talk is devoted to two main periods in Fredro’s life: his childhood on the family estate at Beńkowa Wisznia, and his military service as an officer in the Polish forces fighting under Napoleon’s banners. With all the numerous digressions and asides, roughly more than two thirds of the work deals with Fredro’s experiences in the Napoleonic campaigns. This is by far the most interesting part of the memoirs, particularly from the point of view of the foreign reader.
Fredro first entered military service in 1809 with the eruption of the Franco-Austrian war. He left home at the age of sixteen to join the Polish army of Prince Józef Poniatowski which was forming in Sandomierz eventually to be incorporated into the Grande Armée. By June of the same year he reached the rank of lieutenant and was made a member of the eleventh regiment of uhlans commanded by Adam Potocki. By April 1812, he had advanced to the rank of captain-adjutant-major and saw action with the Fifth Cavalry Regiment in most of the major battles of the Russian campaign: Romanów, Smolensk, Moscow, and Borodino on the retreat of the Grand Armée. It was during the disastrous retreat from Russia that Fredro fell ill and was taken captive. He was imprisoned in a military hospital in Wilno, but eventually succeeded in escaping. In the disguise of a peasant he crossed the Russian border at Tarnogród on July 8, 1813 and a few weeks later was back in Lwów. Here he spent a short time resting and regaining his health and then set out for Dresden where he rejoined the army. He soon became a member of Napoleon’s staff and took part in the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 alongside his brother Seweryn who commanded a battalion of the Imperial Guard. Fredro saw action at Dresden, Leipzig, and Hanau and for his courage and heroism was awarded the Polish Virtuti Militari and was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor.
With the final collapse of the Grande Armée Fredro, like many thousands of Poles who were serving Napoleon, faithfully followed the Emperor back to Paris. Although old acquaintances and visits to the theaters of the French capital made life tolerable despite the humiliation and frustration of defeat, he succumbed in time to the mood of despair and mute anger that gripped the Polish troops in France. The Emperor’s promises of a liberated Poland had proven empty and in the sober reassessment of their destiny that came in the wake of the collapse of the French army the Poles began to see clearly, perhaps for the first time since the campaigns of Santo Domingo (1802-3) and Spain (1808-ll), the cynical use Napoleon had made of them and the reward of misery their devotion and sacrifice had won. The last act, and the most bitter, of the Polish Napoleonic drama was played in St. Denis in 1814. From Paris Fredro returned to Galicia, pausing briefly on the way in Vienna where he met the woman who was later to become his wife. After a short period of social lionizing in Lwów, he settled on his estate at Beńkowa Wisznia where he sought to rid his mind of the now distasteful memories of war by occupying himself with the management of the property left him by his father and by writing comedies. By the time of the Goszczyński and Dunin-Borkowski attacks he was already recognized as Poland’s greatest writer of comedies. And he has remained such to the present day.
Napoleon’s death on St. Helena in 1821 and the subsequent elaboration of the Napoleonic myth by the European Romantics had a profound impact on the Polish consciousness. When the Great Emigration reached France after the defeat of the November Insurrection of 1830-31, it arrived precisely at a time when the Napoleonic legend enjoyed the official sanction of the bourgeois monarchy of the “citizen king” Louis Philippe. The climate was thus ripe for the spread of the legende napoléonienne among the Poles whose own stake in the Napoleonic adventure had been so great. Napoleon again became one of the symbols of Polish national unity and glory. Despite his failure with respect to Poland, Polish émigré Romantic poets, particularly the foremost among them, Adam Mickiewicz, began expounding Napoleon worship as a basic tenet of the émigré faith. They insisted on seeing Napoleon not only as the perfect image of the Hero in the Romantic sense, but the force that enabled the Poles as a nation to regain their dignity by granting them the opportunity to fight as free men for a cause they were dedicated to with the fullness of their beings: the restoration of an independent Poland. The animosity toward Napoleon harbored by many Polish troops who had witnessed the collapse of Polish hopes in the defeat of the Grande Armée in no significant way obstructed the growth of the Romantic Napoleonic cult among the masses of the émigrés. When the mystagogue, Andrzej Towiański, appeared among the émigrés in Paris in 1841, Napoleonism was raised to the level of a religious doctrine. And it was preached that way by Mickiewicz in the last two years of his lectureship of Slavic literature at the Collège de France in Paris (1840-44).
Napoleon, the émigrés were willing to concede, had failed, but he had made it possible for the Poles again to know national pride and this is what mattered. Napoleon became the rallying point of the Great Emigration and voices of dissension (there were some, after all) were drowned in a sea of ecstatic acclaim. Until the demise of Polish romanticism in the fires of the January Insurrection of 1863, Napoleonism remained a vital inspirational force in the émigré community.
The Napoleon we find in Topsy Turvy Talk stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the mythologized deity of the Romantics. Fredro never succumbed to the Napoleonic hero-worship of the émigré community, which doubtless became another factor in his estrangement from the Romantics. In addition to being far distant from the world of the emigration, he also had played an active role in the Polish Napoleonic drama and had a first hand knowledge of what existed merely as legend for the émigré poets. They worshipped Napoleon as a deity and this worship admitted no truly objective appraisal of the Emperor’s intentions with regard to Poland and what the Polish involvement in the wars cost in terms of human life and national dignity. But Fredro’s personal participation in the campaigns did not permit him the luxury of a detached romantic view of the Emperor. He saw the cynicism of Napoleon toward the Poles, the false promises, the ignominious campaigns the Poles were asked to fight on the strength of the Emperor’s hollow words that their efforts ultimately served the cause of Poland. From the vantage point of middle age he could see all too clearly the price the Poles paid for the empty hope Napoleon held out to them. And in Topsy Turvy Talk he came to a settling of scores.
His attitude toward Napoleon became resentful, even bitter, and the portrait of Napoleon he drew in Topsy Turvy Talk was anything but flattering. The Hero of the Romantics is presented in cynical, vain, unheroic, and even ludicrous terms. The stage for Fredro’s debunking is set in the opening paragraph of the work. This treatment of Napoleon could only have evoked the wrath of the Romantics had they had a chance to read Topsy Turvy Talk; but they did not. The memoirs were published first in 1877. By this time the great Polish Romantic poets had passed into history and romanticism itself had given way to the positivism that came to dominate Polish thinking after the events of 1863.
Insurrection clearly had failed in Polish attempts to regain independence, and the Positivists, well aware of what these failures cost in terms of Polish suffering, sought other means, less spectacular but surer they felt of preparing the nation for the day of national regeneration. They disavowed not only the messianism of the Romantics, but also the Romantic Napoleonism. In their journalism and fiction (Bolesław Prus’s great novel of contemporary Warsaw, Lalka (The Doll, 1890), is a typical example) they sought to expose the myth of Napoleon as folly and a pernicious vestige of romanticism still capable of exciting enthusiasm for military adventure, still capable of seducing Poles away from the practical tasks of raising Polish society from the despair that followed in the wake of the savage repression of the uprising of 1863.
Fredro was misunderstood, ignored, and ultimately rejected by the Romantics. The reconstruction of his fame and a true evaluation of his contribution to Polish literature came only in the time of positivism. Now the playwright’s natural conservatism and lack of enthusiasm for romantic posturing were no longer held up as defects of character. Now there were no longer demands that he withdraw from literature, but that he make available to an impatient audience eagerly awaiting them whatever new plays he had written during the period of his “silence.” When Topsy Turvy Talk appeared, finally, in 1877, the climate of Polish literary opinion was favorably disposed toward Fredro. Although the work evoked little immediate response — its composition and the subtlety of Fredro’s humor and irony would have militated against this — the unheroic, half-mocking, half-bitter treatment of Napoleon and the shattering of the Polish Romantic Napoleonic myth could only have enhanced Fredro’s position ideologically among the Positivists.
Full appreciation of the literary as well as ideological significance of Fredro’s memoirs came only in the early twentieth century, not much more than a decade after the powerful repudiation of the Napoleonic myth by Stefan Żeromski in his epic novel of the Napoleonic campaigns, Ashes (Popioły, 1904). In this work, the Emperor’s disposition toward his thousands of Polish troops is characterized by cynicism and indifference. Although he appears only a few times in the novel, Napoleon is presented in negative terms: emotionless, remote, whatever youthful idealism he might have had sacrificed to personal ambition. There is little human about him. The most insistent image is that of stone, of granite — cold, hard, unfeeling, immobile. In Topsy Turvy Talk Fredro set about debunking the Romantic myth of Napoleon in a different manner. For Fredro, the Emperor is not only politically cynical, but personally ludicrous, the more so for his being not the deity of Romantic legend, but a human being subject to human emotions and human frailties. Fredro toppled Napoleon from his pedestal by portraying him in thoroughly human terms, sitting small and hunchbacked on a horse, swearing and cursing, warming himself by a fire, firing a cannon but falling wide of the mark. It was a technique Sterne would have approved of and one Tolstoy was to employ after Fredro in his own myth-toppling in War and Peace.
The battle of Leipzig serves as a background against which Fredro traces the impact of the imminent French defeat on the Emperor’s Polish forces. From a somewhat ludicrous figure, Napoleon here becomes an unscrupulous leader who freely gave the Poles promises he had no intention of backing up only in order to win additional support and thousands of loyal troops for his cause. Fredro’s disenchantment and hostility toward Napoleon stand out boldly in his bitter account of the sharp encounter between the Emperor and Prince Antoni Sułkowski at the time of the formation of the Galician army under Poniatowski. Finally, in his humorous demonstration based upon his own experiences of the disadvantages of Napoleon’s proximity in time of battle, Fredro suggests, I think, the more profound sense of the fruitlessness and danger that had characterized the Polish attachment to and involvement in the Napoleonic adventure.
a note on the translation
The translation that follows consists of the greater part of Fredro’s memoirs. I have omitted the last section of the original work dealing mostly with the author’s childhood on the grounds that the material is not particularly interesting to the non-Polish reader and to a certain extent is dealt with in the “Napoleonic” section of the memoirs. The bulk of Topsy Turvy Talk comprises Fredro’s Napoleonic experiences; it is in this record that the memoirs hold their greatest appeal.
Since the end of World War II, two major editions of Topsy Turvy Talk have been published in Poland: the Kraków edition of 1949, published by M. Kot and edited by Henryk Mościcki, with an afterword by Wacław Borowy, and the Warsaw edition of 1957, published by Książka i Wiedza, also edited by Henryk Mościcki, with an introduction by Adam Grzymała-Siedlecki. Both, in fact, are based on the Mościcki edition of 1922. It should be pointed out that the Borowy afterword to the 1949 edition remains the best Polish study of the memoirs to date. In translating Trzy po trzy I have consulted these various editions of the memoirs but have relied primarily on the text as it appears in both parts of volume XIII of the fifteen-volume collected edition of Fredro’s works published by the State Publishing Institute (Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy) in Warsaw between 1955 and 1980. The collected edition was under the editorship of Stanisław Pigoń and contains an introduction by Kazimierz Wyka.
There is also the matter of the division of the memoirs to consider. In Polish editions, the work appears as an uninterrupted narrative, not divided into chapters. In order to facilitate the reading, I have divided the translation into more or less even parts. This division, while arbitrary, generally conforms to logical breaks in the narrative structure.
In addition to the above Polish works on Fredro’s memoirs, the only previous study in English must be mentioned at this time: Wiktor Weintraub’s “Aleksander Fredro and His Anti-Romantic Memoirs” (The American Slavic and East European Review [December 1953], 534-48). The remarks on Topsy Turvy Talk as a possible source of Joseph Conrad’s A Personal Record (546-48) are particularly interesting. My own article, “The Polish Napoleonic Cult from Mickiewicz to Żeromski: A Rapid Survey” (Indiana Slavic Studies, Vol. IV [1967], 128-51), also contains pertinent background material as does my book, The Major Comedies of Alexander Fredro (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1969).
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TOPSY TURVY TALK
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On the eighteenth of February 1814 a somewhat plump middle-aged man, wearing a gray frock coat fastened under the collar and a three-cornered hat fitted with no other decoration save a small tricolored cockade, was riding along on a white horse. Behind him, at a certain distance, another man — considerably younger, also in a frock coat but one that was dark green in color, also in a hat without any insignia, also stooping just like the first man and perhaps even more so — was sitting astride a roan horse. The white horse, of Oriental blood, was small, inconspicuous, but courageous. The roan, however, was… like a roan; it is difficult to say any more about him. Unrestrained either by the fame of his forbears or his own disposition, he stumbled frequently on the road fate ordained for him daily. The first of these riders was Napoleon, the second was I. Between us the sizable imperial staff, where I had my place as if at the bitter end, widely extended its wings to the right and to the left along the snow-covered field. After them followed the service squadrons of the guard, and at the very end a noisy and unruly brood of camp servants with the loose- and pack-horses of the staff officers. So rode the Emperor, so rode all, and so rode I.
As many stars as there are in the sky on a clear night, so many were the places, quarters, subjects, and unimaginable labyrinths to which our scattered thoughts were driven. And each thought in turn, like the fiery trail of a rocket, consisted of a million sparks, the sparks of memory or of hope. These sparks fell now on throned carpets, now on the lawn of the family cottage. They mixed with the glowing light of a banquet or with the faint beam of a night lamp beside the bed of someone ill. More than one flitted past the rosy lips of a loved one, more than one descended like a light sleep along a mother’s blessing, so dear at every period in one’s life. There were some that punctured the vaults of the firmament, and some that entered graves already filled. Many, many of them scrambled along the rungs of honors, riches and fame, but there were also many that fell on the flower of a peaceful domestic life. In short, the past, the present, the future, the world, worlds known and unknown were the field of play of our scattered thoughts, when suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, all of them, struck by the same force, gathered on a single point.
This point was a tremendous roar and repeated a short distance ahead of us.1 — Cannon! Yes, cannon, there was no doubt. They roared more and more as though in a contest to determine which was the loudest… Soon carbine fire, as though someone spread peas on a drum, filled the gap in the artillery thunder. — Aha! more than one of us said and looked into his canteen, alias flask. — Aha, we said, but no one had an idea who was attacking, who was retreating, if it was some corps or other or an entire army that was beginning the dance. In the final analysis no one knew anything. — They’re fighting… God grant us peace, that is our daily ration, but why here and not there, why today and not tomorrow, no one stopped to ponder. At such times the critical analysis of every command, of every deed of a superior was not the required task of subalterns. An army did not debate in parliament. It fought. A senior explained the matter only to his senior, and a junior listened with obedience and acted as he was told to. But tempora mutantur et nos mutantur in illis. Maybe it is true that the person who’s getting gray is losing his soul, just as if somebody were cleaving it chip by chip, so that in the end he remains completely without it. Maybe it’s true that prudence only hinders, experience only needlessly tangles things up… maybe it’s true that blood boiling with youth is the one and only mover of everything good and great… and maybe, finally, it’s true that only the stupid, the dead wood, the old wigs and nightcaps ask what the end of something may be. So it is, all this may be true, but I’m free not to believe these truths. Although I’ve passed my fiftieth year, I grieve at the thought of abdicating the rights of man. I would already be inclined to dye my hair a little darker.
Well now, as Kiliński2 used to say, soon no one doubted that the battle lay ahead of us, and that we were going toward it. Reality, like that autumn wind at the setting of the sun that refreshes yet smarts at the same time, drove from us the cloud of daydreams which settles frequently on the monotonous movement of a peaceful march. Each one of us shook as if just waking from sleep and thought about himself. The one who was bent over triple clanged his spurs along the lowered stirrups, and the one who, wanting to rest a wearied part of his body, had leaned to a side in such a way that he reached the saddle holster with one leg while he was almost standing on the other, corrected himself on the saddle as though he heard the command: Attention! Another tightened the strap of his shako or hat, while someone else put his reins in order and drew the loops closer to the horse’s mane. Everyone uncovered the handle of his sabre which was covered with his coat, looked it over, and then, raising his head, took in a breath of fresh air before catching sight of what was about to greet him.
At last white smoke appeared before us and we soon perceived the black lines of infantry. Long, short, thrust out in front, drawn back in the rear, they were reflected against the white background like freshly dug excavations, with the distinction that around them life appeared an incessant movement of small points, like ants around an ant-hill. Certainly no one was dozing over there, no one was even thinking — life never burns more briskly and brightly than when face to face with death and frequently its most powerful brilliance is its last.
At first glance it was possible to see that we were not arriving at the beginning of the battle. An opposing wind, or heavy air, or the disposition of the land, or perhaps everything combined was responsible for our hearing the roaring of the cannon so late. It was something unexpected…and good!… In everything, you have to have change and novelty in order to live happily.
We enter the battle from the left wing… Vive l’Empereur! Lines compress into masses… cannon move down from their positions… movement to the right… later the columns form anew… the batteries stand in detachments… we fire, attack, triumph … Montereau is in our hands. We handled ourselves well, there’s no doubt about it, but Marshal Victor3 can also take some pride in the fact that he did not forestall us in this. The Emperor said a few words to him that should be repeated like everything that came out of that great man’s mouth, for everyone willingly listens to them or reads them. But the Emperor, though an emperor, sometimes used such really emphatic, personal, and curt expressions that they are hard enough for a historian to repeat let alone translate. One must limit oneself then to a free paraphrase, which I shall do, saying simply that after the battle at Montereau the Emperor told Marshal Victor: ”Go to hell!” — And after that brief speech he entrusted the command of the corps to General Gérard.4 Before all of this happened and before I found out about it, a battery of horse artillery of the guard from the garden of the Surville Palace which dominates the town of Montereau as well as the roads along which the retreating enemy withdrew, bid him farewell to the best of its ability. Everyone knows that Napoleon himself directed a cannon there, and everyone also knows that he said to his guardists: “Don’t be afraid, the shell hasn’t been forged that can kill me.” But certainly everyone doesn’t know that at the time several paces to the rear stood a roan, and on the roan sat I.
When people want to express the excellence of such and such a deed, they usually say: He did this or that like a king! But people who have bean so accustomed to speaking
express themselves badly for not only a king, but the emperor and king in the same person aimed, fired, and… missed. The shot fell in front of the enemy line. Some still insist that his aim was good… perhaps… but since I know little about artillery I shall say simpliciter what I saw with my own two eyes and that was that His Imperial Highness was way off his mark.
After this scene another ensued. An officer from a French line regiment, a Pole, fetched the captured standard. He got a cross and fourteen napoleons. Few people have been as poor as I was, but still the thought of accepting money as part of a prize for a worthy deed didn’t please me in the least. I was still young!
To possess a horse less absent-minded than my roan… to possess a good cloak… (Oh, my white cloak!) A cloak is a friend by day, a guardian, a benefactor by night when a stump of wood serves as a pillow and snow as a mattress… To possess, finally, a flask always filled with a few drops of comfort — these are the best things of all, no one can deny it, just as no one can deny that without this base thing called money they can’t be had. You come out from under the roof where you spent a comfortable night… a summer morning… your horse, well fed and tidied up, pricks his ears, paws the ground with his hooves… you mount him hardly having touched his mane and stirrups… March! You enter the battle. Before you a river, beyond the river a battery is strewing shot all around. — After me, men! Trust in God! The river is crossed, arms seized, the victory is ours! A fine deed, worthy of a reward, but on this favorable occasion you developed only talents that lay in you still untapped. Onto the scales then fell from one side the fear of injury or death, from the other side courage inflamed with all the fire of blood, all the health of life. Fear, then, had to flee without even manifesting itself.
But just take a look at the fellow who after a few months of daily battle with hunger, cold and the enemy knocks away the rest of the blackened sheaf from under the snout of a hungry jade… raises himself on the saddle under which there is no longer any carcass… unwraps the remnant of his cloak… grabs hold of the sabre handle which the rain has rusted and the hoarfrost silvered… and if he astonishes you with some wonderful deed, then give him your laurel wreath for he has earned it twice over. If, moreover, he sacrificed himself voluntarily for the common good, kneel on his grave, for he is worthy of your tribute. Thus we watched the French sappers entering the broken ice of the Berezina river.5 Repairing the broken bridges, they laid down their lives as a gangway… They knew well what they were doing, but they still did not retreat a step. For the elevation of their courage they didn’t even have the resistance of the enemy… they didn’t have in view their native thresholds from which a farewell greeting would accompany their martyrdom. They perished in the snows of Lithuania or in the prisons of Wilno. Their ungrateful fatherland did not even surrender their names to posterity. Only one of them returned to France and in his own roost spent the days of his old age in suffering and want.6 Napoleon was no longer.