Jan Kochanowski’s Treny

Even though he was probably the most significant Slav poet of the pre-Romantic era, Jan Kochanowski (1530–84) is still relatively little known outside Poland, and so far there has been only one English-language biography (Welsh, 1974). However, there is great beauty in his poetry and what we know of his life and career at the royal court reveals a great deal about Renaissance Poland.

Kochanowski’s lifetime spanned the golden years of the ‘high’ Renaissance in Poland, a period of political stability for the Polish state and a period when the ‘new faith’ of Protestantism, in both Calvinist and Lutheran variations, spread rapidly. This period saw Polish achievements in geography, history, literature, theatre and printing. It was a period of religious toleration: indeed Poland proved to be a sanctuary for the persecuted religions of Western Europe. Poland had no native royal family, but the nobility elected the monarch of their choice. When Kochanowski was born, the Swedish Vasa Zygmunt I Stary was on the Polish throne. In 1548, when Zygmunt I died, the Vasa line in Poland was interrupted and Zygmunt II Augustus, a Jagiellon, was elected. In 1586, two years after Kochanowski’s death Zygmunt III, another of the Vasa line, was elected.

By 1600, with the exception of Russia, Poland was the largest European state: it had a population of about 10 million – twice the population of England. It stretched from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea. Huge areas of the country were virgin forest: wild bears, wolves, lynx, elk, aurochs and bison were still common. Poland in these years was unlike Western Europe in many ways, but Erasmus of Rotterdam was of the opinion that it rivalled the most glorious and sophisticated of Western nations.

The ravages of the Black Death in Western Europe had caused a crisis in late medieval society by making the continuance of the medieval idea of the peasantry increasingly difficult to sustain. However, the plague had left Poland relatively unscathed and its social structures almost unaffected (Ziegler, 1970: 118; Anderson, 1984: 279). Consequently the majority of the population still formed a vast peasantry tied to the great estates. Over this huge territory the population spoke a wide range of local dialects – standardized Polish had yet to emerge – and there were in any case many other peasant populations besides Poles: Kaszuby, Belarus, Ukrainian, Ruthenian and Lithuanian. In total less than half the population were ethnically or linguistically Polish. And this vast peasant mass was illiterate.

Political and intellectual life in Poland at this time centred not on Warsaw, which was then a tiny village, but on the towns and grain trading centres of Danzig (Gdańsk), Toruń (Thorn), Kraków (Krakau), Lublin, Lwów (Lviv, Lemberg) and Wilno (Vilna) – where, because they were populated by large numbers of Germans, English, Scots, Jews, Tatars, Lithuanians and Ukrainians, Poles were not always the dominant influence. In Poland the merchant middle class often comprised Germans rather than Poles (Davies, 1981: 304–5). The Polish szlachta – ‘the immemorial nobility’ which formed Poland’s combined high-born and military strata – did not, in general, have much use for towns or banks. Indeed, until the sixteenth century they had been forbidden to own town houses, but many had built ‘towns’ of their own on their huge estates. They demonstrated their wealth with generous hospitality, displays of hunting equipment and trophies, and in magnificent portable goods such as exotic clothes, colourfully dyed horses, ornate weapons, gold threaded cloth, silver saddles and tents.

The origins of the word szlachta are obscure, but it is probably related to a conjectured prehistoric Germanic root word *slakh, *slag or *slōg (to hit or strike) which it is thought gave rise to the Old High German slaht and slahta, associated with the modern German schlagen (to strike, fight, cleave, breed) and Geschlecht (sex, species, family, race). The same Old High German root also furnished modern English with slaughter, onslaught and slay. The OED gives historical cognates in several Germanic languages. Norman Davies has suggested that the word szlachta entered the Polish language via Czech (Davies, 1981: 207; Anderson, 1984: 283; Partridge, 1978; Ayto, 1990).

It has been estimated that there were about 25,000–40,000 szlachta families, representing by the end of the sixteenth century 7–13 per cent of the total population (Tazbir, 1973: 11; Anderson, 1984: 283; Davies, 1986: 215; Walicki, 1990: 24). By the mid sixteenth century the szlachta had enshrined their position and privilege in law and had become a kind of closed caste. While some of the lesser nobility were little more than a proud but impoverished hołota (rabble), others held modest estates. However, in central and western Poland szlachta estates were often substantial. In the south and east of the Polish state (the areas that were eventually to become parts of Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukraine) the relationship of the szlachta to the land and the people on the land was virtually ‘colonial’ and the estates could be vast. Chancellor Zamoyski’s estates in the south-east consisted of two million acres, including 80 towns and 800 villages. By the early seventeenth century the Wiśnowiecki holdings in the eastern Ukraine had some 230,000 ‘subjects’; by the eighteenth century the Potockis owned three million acres in the Ukraine and the Radziwiłłs owned ten million acres in Lithuania. By the mid eighteenth century the szlachta families had accumulated more lands than the Polish crown. And besides the szlachta there were a great many gentry landowners who claimed ancient roots, possessed substantial estates, enjoyed a similar lifestyle and shared a very similar mindset (Anderson, 1984: 284–5; Davies, 1986: 300).

The Renaissance in Poland generally supported the intellectual developments and traditions underpinning the szlachta and the gentry and brought about an unparalleled growth in humanist thinking, reflected particularly in urban development and in the universities. However, the arts in Poland were largely for the elite: patronage was very hard to come by, except for architects and religious composers. It has been noted that the areas of Poland and of Polish society least affected by the spread of Protestantism were those where illiteracy was highest, while Protestantism had most impact where literacy was high. While levels of literacy are hard to define, and some of the evidence is contradictory, it has been estimated that 70–90 per cent of male Polish nobles could read and write, but only 25 per cent of noble women. Sixty per cent of landowning gentry could ‘hardly sign’, 25 per cent could not; only 15 per cent could read and write (Kawecka-Grzyczowa and Tazbir, 1998: 421).

Although wealthy nobles and magnates cultivated the arts, in Poland they did not do so in the same way as in Italy, France or England, since cultural and economic life centred not on the courts or towns, but on the distant provincial estates, where the szlachta and the landowning gentry were embedded in the international timber, fur and grain trades, and heavily reliant on the muscle power of the peasantry. In Poland the szlachta elaborated a complex and exclusive social code which reached the peak of its influence in the sixteenth century. However, along with the gentry, their intellectual needs seem to have been generally rather modest:

Two classes of readers existed in Poland in Kochanowski’s time, as elsewhere in Europe: the intellectual elite, versed in Greek and Latin literatures, with a humanistic turn of mind and often cosmopolitan in outlook; and the great mass of the rural gentry, whose preferred and often only reading matter consisted of the Psalms, sermons, hymnals and works of instruction such as The Art of Choosing a Wife and How to Behave at Table. (Welsh, 1974: 113)

The ‘ruralization’ of Polish literary culture was reinforced in the seventeenth century when the devastating impact of foreign forces in Poland led to a general retreat into a culture of urbane, private and personal manuscript production, rather than the development of national literary life through publication.

It has been said that because of its religious tolerance Poland was a paradise for Jews. However, Norman Davies has made the point that a more accurate description would probably have been ‘Paradise of the Nobility, Purgatory for the Burghers and Hell for the Peasants’. Land, profit from the land, and szlachta and gentry privileges were not maintained by kindness and humanist poetry:

Common cruelty was an established feature of social life. Faced with the congenital idleness, drunkenness, and pilfering of the peasantry, the nobleman frequently replied with ferocious impositions and punishments. The lash and the knout were the accepted symbols of noble authority. The serfs were beaten for leaving the estate without permission, for brawls and misdemeanours, and for non-observance of religious practices. A dungeon, together with chains, shackles, stocks, hooks, and instruments of torture, were part of the regular inventory. In cases of incorrigible theft or insubordination, the death sentence in a variety of forms was readily applied. Although judicial forms were usually observed – Magdeburg Law in some medieval settlements, and customary law in most Polish villages – there was little to prevent the lord from indulging his fantasies. It was all but impossible in a peasant family for the boys to refuse demands for extra labour and for the girls to resist service ‘in the House’ or the insidious droit de seigneur. (Davies, 1981: 243)

The development of Polish tolerance may have been an irregular progress, but in general Polish monarchs did not consider issues of religion to be their business unless and until they impinged on the constitution and on royal powers. Zygmunt II Stary was reluctantly persuaded by the English Henry VIII to make some moves against heresy, but without the approval of the Sejm (Parliament) he could do little, and when pushed to more vigorous action, he allegedly snubbed a papal envoy with the words: ‘Allow me to rule over the goats as well as the sheep’ (Zamoyski, 1989: 86). Progress towards toleration was hesitant: Mikołaj Kopernik (Nicholas Copernicus) had been in a position to put the Catholic authorities in Poland on the defensive with his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543), but had kept his findings secret for many years for fear of prosecution, and the work was eventually published by his friends in the year of his death.

Although Catholics were the majority, other religions, including Uniates, Orthodox, Calvinists, Lutherans, Menonites, Anabaptists, Karaites, Muslims, Bohemian Brethren, Antitrinitarians (including Unitarians, Socinians, Arians, Polish Brethren) and Jews, made up more than a third of the population. Throughout the second half of the sixteenth century Lutheranism spread among the mainly German urban middle class, while Calvinism spread among the gentry and many of the better educated. Whatever the gentry did, the szlachta generally remained Catholic, while the peasantry remained Catholic or Orthodox. On the part of the szlachta this was a kind of aloof indifference to what others did or thought: for the peasantry it was both traditional and a kind of unimaginative stubbornness. However, religious tolerance was the norm, and in Poland very few went to the stake for their religious beliefs (Tazbir, 1973: 74–89; Zamoyski, 1989: 84). Jews, for example, were not required to wear identifying clothes or badges; their rights of trade, taxation, movement and worship were enshrined in law. Religious tolerance and favourable trading conditions meant that the Jewish population of Poland increased fivefold during the sixteenth century and by 1576 it is estimated that there were 150,000 Jews in Poland (Piekarski, 1979; Wandycz, 1993; Elton, 1972; Elliot, 1972).

The first surviving poem in the Polish language – a very accomplished hymn to the Virgin Mary which probably had its origins in a long history of oral composition – appeared in the thirteenth century, and although by the middle of the sixteenth century writers were working in the Polish language, in general they followed very closely established classical rhetorical models of narration and dialogue: Polish was not yet a literary language. Until Mikołaj Rej (1505–69) and Jan Kochanowski began writing in Polish, Latin was by far the most prestigious literary language available to Poles and imitatio – the imitation of the dominant Latin models in form and genre – was the order of the day (Borowski, 2003). Though the Catholics were to retain Latin, Protestants, Socinians and others began to use Polish more extensively around this time, but it was only in the later half of the sixteenth century that Polish began to replace Latin in sermons, in the courts, in regional seats of government and in literature (Zamoyski, 1987; Davies, 1981; Miłosz, 1983; Klimasazewski, 1983).

We do not know as much as we would like about Jan Kochanowski. Documents referring to him are few and he was by nature a private man and a discreet courtier. However, it is possible to put together an outline of his life. He was born at Sycyna, near Radom, in 1530, the son of Piotr Kochanowski, a nobleman and judge in Sandomierz. His family seems to have ranked among the lesser nobility. Jan was one of 11 children, two of whom were to become influential and respected writers. In 1544, aged about 14 he went to the Kraków Academy. He stayed there for three years until his father died, when he went home. At about the same time plague hit Kraków, and Kochanowski, who had not yet graduated, continued his studies elsewhere – probably in Wrocław (Breslau), Wittenberg and then Leipzig. In 1552 he went to Königsberg, to the court of the Lutheran Prince Albrecht of Prussia, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship.

Kochanowski’s travels are almost undocumented and rather mysterious. In 1552, aged about 20 he visited Padua for the first time: this was the centre of Renaissance style and a popular centre of learning for Polish nobles. He stayed there for several years, studying classical Latin and Greek literature and philology, Homer, Theocritus, Pindar, Horace, Ovid, Catullus, Seneca and Lucretius. It is thought he was under the tutelage of Francesco Robortello (d. 1567) and possibly also the poet, logician and philosopher Bernardino Tomitano, who had written an influential book on Italian vernacular in poetry. Kochanowski became very knowledgeable on the works of Cicero and it is thought he may also have studied the works of Dante, Petrarch and Ariosto. Kochanowski was modest, industrious and businesslike in the application of his talents. Having established a reputation as a poet in Latin he returned to Poland, then journeyed again to Königsberg (1555 and 1556). He seems to have made two more trips to Italy (1556 and 1559) and to have visited Rome several times. In 1557 he is known to have sailed from Italy to Marseille and then travelled on to Paris where he is thought to have stayed for three months. In one of his Latin poems Kochanowski says he ‘saw’ Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85), the initiator of French vernacular poetry, but whether Kochanowski literally saw him at a distance or actually met him is unclear.

Upon his return to Poland, perhaps in 1559, Kochanowski received as his inheritance the modest, but nevertheless substantial hereditary family estate at Czarnolas (literally Blackwood), near Lublin. He considered a career in the Church, served briefly at the court of Bishop Padniewski in Kraków and at the court of the Palatine Firlej in Lublin and was offered several lucrative parishes. For a while he wanted to become the abbot at Miechów monastery. However, he earned the patronage of the newly appointed Deputy Chancellor, Bishop Piotr Myszkowski, and through his good offices, and as one of the best-educated and most widely travelled men of his generation, was appointed to the Chancellery as one of King Zygmunt II Augustus’s secretaries. This was a highly responsible post held at various times by some of the leading intellects of the day including Andrzej Fricz-Modrzewski, Jan Zamoyski and Stanisław Hosius. The secretariat dealt with foreign relations and foreign correspondence, the proceedings of the Senate and its many committees, took charge of the royal archive, all copying and interpreting at court, the preparation of instructions to ambassadors, letters of credence from the king and the Senate and the writing of official reports. For the rest of his working life – another 15 years – Kochanowski, although uneasy at court and never what might be called a court poet, was tied to the Vasa court in Kraków.

Kraków, with a population of about 30,000, was one of the biggest urban centres in east-central Europe. Throughout the sixteenth century it seems to have moved steadily from German influence in its language and laws towards Polish language and culture. By 1558 the city had an Italian postmaster and its own regular mail service to Italy. King Zygmunt I Stary had been responsible for building there two of the finest examples of Renaissance architecture to be found outside Italy – the massive Wawel Castle (1502–44), and the Zygmunt chapel in Wawel Cathedral (1517–33). By the end of the sixteenth century Kraków also had an enormous market place, a cloth sellers’ hall, a town hall with an impressive tower, a cathedral, monasteries, nunneries, cloisters, residential town palaces, an Academy and a host of brick Gothic churches including the Mariacki church with its two uneven spires and wonderful carved altar by Wit Stwosz (1477–89).

In 1473 Jasper (or Kasper) Haube, a German immigrant, set up a printshop in Kraków. His first product was a wall calendar, followed a year later by Jan de Turrecremata’s Explanatio in psalterium. The first book in Polish, Biernat of Lublin’s Raj duszny (‘Paradise of the Soul’) was produced by the Ungler house in 1513. After this, perhaps 8,000 titles, including the first Polish translation of the Bible (1552–3), were printed in Poland during the sixteenth century. Most of them, including the writings of Mikolaj Rej, were produced in and around Kraków. The press run by Maciej Wierzbęta alone produced over 175 titles (Kawecka-Grzyczowa and Tazbir, 1998: 416; Steinberg, 1955: 86; Adamczewski, 1973: 22, 24). One of the most important publications was the Great Polish–Latin Dictionary by Jan Maczynski which appeared in 1564.

Although the papal bull published by Innocent VIII in 1487 made the bishops responsible for the censorship of printed books, this seems to have devolved upon the academic staff of the Kraków Academy. The king later gave the bishops the right to conduct searches of printing houses and even of private collections to seek out heresy. Kraków publishers, sometimes operating openly and sometimes clandestinely, served the interests of the new religious trends by publishing Calvinist tracts. In 1490 Szwajpolt Fiol set up another press specializing in liturgical volumes in Old Church Slavonic. But his experience is perhaps emblematic of the sometimes erratic and unpredictable course of Polish tolerance: in 1492 Fiol was the first person to be subjected to ecclesiastical censorship when his Cyrillic publications were thought to be heretical tracts. He was acquitted. Although there were about 30 trials in Kraków in the first half of the sixteenth century, the offenders escaped with nothing more than a reprimand. In spite of the powers of the Church and the Academy, publishing rapidly became an important component of the economic, cultural and religious life of Kraków and print was to be a major influence in developing a standardized national literary language.

Wawel Castle, the royal residence in Kraków, was less than a mile from Kazimierz, one of the largest and liveliest of the rapidly growing Jewish settlements and cultural centres in Poland. Throughout Kochanowski’s lifetime Kazimierz, with its numerous distinguished Renaissance synagogues, was a hive of religious debate, scholarship, learning and publishing. Perhaps the most distinguished of the Kazimierz scholars was Rabbi Mojzesz Isserles (1510 or 1520–72), who was well versed in the works of Aristotle and the Kabbalah. Kazimerz had a long publishing history too. In 1530–1 an anonymous Kazimierz printer produced copies of the Pentateuch and the Haggadah; in 1534 the first Jewish publishing house was established in Kazimierz by the Halicz brothers, who produced Mahzorim (holy day prayer books). At about the same time Rabbi Szera ben Anszela’s texts, aimed to spread Bible knowledge among Jewish women, appeared in Yiddish. In the years 1569–1626 Izaak Prosciejowice also set up a large print works in Kazimierz. While anti-Semitism was not a feature of daily life in Kraków, during the sixteenth century the city later became a centre for the publication of anti-Semitic pamphlets. The Christian and Jewish communities of Poland seem to have lived side by side, but remained almost entirely separate. A conservative Catholic and an enlightened liberal humanist, like most Polish nobles, Kochanowski seems to have taken little, if any, notice of the Jews.

In 1555 King Zygmunt II Augustus, in response the criticisms of the reformationists, and echoing the actions of the English King Henry VIII, stopped all payments to Rome. That same year the Sejm passed a bill which confirmed that Protestants and Catholics had equal rights in law. However, in 1564 the Jesuits were allowed to begin to work in Poland and commenced their mission with the claim that religious tolerance was a sin. They succeeded in reconverting a number of prominent Protestants, particularly Calvinists. Kochanowski seems to have remained largely unaffected by the Reformation, though some critics have detected Protestant and Calvinist sympathies. He resolutely maintained relations with both Catholic and Protestant friends and criticized only the proliferation of religious sects in Poland and the persistent corruption of the clergy – topics on which most religious communities could agree.

Even when it came to breakaway groups within Catholicism, Kochanowski seems to have done no more than wish them to ‘go to Trent’. The Council of Trent, the nineteenth Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church, was a response to the challenge of the Protestant Reformation. It was convened in the years 1545–63 in the city of Trent (modern Trento) in Italy. It was one of the most important councils in the history of the Catholic Church since it reorganized the forces of the Church by recognizing the order of the Jesuits (founded 1534, approved by Pope Paul III in 1540), redirected the work of the Inquisition, and identified the aims of the Vatican with the political ambitions of Spain. Among other things it aimed to stamp out heresy, restore orthodoxy and re-establish the supreme authority of the Pope by defining what constituted an acceptable marital union in the eyes of the Church – marriage between a Catholic and an Orthodox Christian was allowed, but marriage between a Catholic and a Muslim or a Jew, or marriage between a Catholic and Protestant, was condemned as a mortal sin. Its edict was accepted in Poland in 1577. However, Kochanowski commented on moral issues only in his poetry and then with great care, dignity and a sense of decorum. Detached humanism and scepticism about the value of theological pronouncements, coupled with what Miłosz has called the ‘pagan element of Stoicism’, rendered Kochanowski’s verse accessible and ecumenical (Miłosz, 1983: 62).

Kochanowski valued free thought and the rational ordering of human emotional experience. He was a Renaissance man, but unlike Shakespeare, who feared the mob, saw how the degrees under heaven had become disordered and yet marvelled ‘What a piece of work is a man’ (Hamlet II.ii), Kochanowski inhabited what was still by and large a traditional society where he sang the praises of God, cherished the existence of humanity and saw the world primarily as a traditional Catholic, each man in their place under a well ordered heaven. This did not prevent him from identifying problems within Catholicism and traditional Polish life. Janusz Tazbir has pointed to an example of this. In 1556, when a woman called Dorota Łazęcka was accused of smuggling a host from church to give to her Jewish employers – it was said they planned to extract blood from it for secret rites – at the request of Papal Nuncio Lipomano an ecclesiastical court sentenced her and three Jews to burn at the stake. King Zygmunt Augustus intervened to release the prisoners, commenting that he did not think it likely that anyone could get blood from a host, and shortly afterwards Lipomano left Poland. Kochanowski referred to him in a satire:

Papal Envoy of the Roman people,

You show us the way, yet you miss the ford.

Find your way better than your driver,

Or you might take us to a place of tears and sorrow.

(Tazbir, 1973: 76)

There is no escaping his sense of tolerance, just as there is no escaping his sense that God’s representatives on earth were venal, ambitious, fallible humans.

However, while he was determined to remain subject to God’s will, Kochanowski was also likely to have sympathy with those who denied any denomination’s idea that their Church had a monopoly on salvation:

What do you want of us, great God, who gives

Limitless favour to each thing that lives?

The Church will not contain you, you, entire

In every inch of water, land and fire.

Riches is useless since to you alone

Belongs each jewel that man thinks his own.

A grateful heart, great God, is all that can

Be offered to you by poor things like man.

You built the sky, embroidered galaxies

And sketched foundations so that from them rise

Perimeters too huge for me to trace:

Earth’s nakedness you covered with green grace.

The Spring brings garlands and the Summer wears

A crown of wheat like girls who dance at fairs.

Autumn dispenses apples, wine and mirth.

Then winter sluggishly prepares the earth.

At night your gardeners spray each plant with dew.

By day your rain wakes withering plants anew.

The beasts eat at your hand and every sense

Is nourished by you with munificence.

Immortal God, grace most continual,

Be praised for ever. Keep us where we shall

Best serve your purpose, now and when we die

Safe in the shadow of your wings that fly.

(Peterkiewicz and Singer, 1970: 5)

Kochanowski’s duties at court seem to have left him plenty of time for writing. His compositions at this period seem mainly have been for the entertainment of his friends and included two sets of lyrics, Zgoda (‘Concord’, 1562), Satyr (1564) a critique of ancient chroniclers, O Czechu i Lechu historyja naganiona (‘About Czechs and Poles a History of Blame’) about the legendary founders of the Czech and Polish states, and a verse book about chess. In 1567–8 he helped with the preparations for the war against the Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible and may even have taken part in the campaign itself. After this, however, Kochanowski began to spend more time away from court at Czarnolas.

In 1569, with the signature of the Union of Lublin, Zygmunt II Augustus succeeded in transforming his personal territorial possessions into the united Rzeczpospolita (Republic) of Poland-Lithuania. However, his death in 1572 left the Polish throne and its vast territories vacant. What followed was a prolonged and rather undignified international auction. In 1573, 40,000 mounted Polish nobles gathered outside Warsaw. They elected Henri de Valois, Duke of Anjou (known in Polish as Henryk Walezy), as their king. Henri was forced to abandon his persecution of Protestants in France in order to take up the Polish throne. He had no previous connection to Poland, and his reign was to be very brief. In Poland he found that the atmosphere of toleration and mutual respect frustrated his attempts to drive a wedge between Catholic and Protestant Polish gentry. He then found that he was not permitted to expand his army or to dismiss any of the civil or military officials in the administration he had inherited. Furthermore he had to gain the express consent of the Sejm every two years for all important decisions. He realized that in Poland he was no more than a figurehead: the real power lay with the nobles. They did not trust him and forced him to sign a declaration that the throne was not to become hereditary. On his brother’s death, Henri, with considerable relief, abandoned the Polish throne and at dead of night sneaked away to France. His reign had lasted 118 days.

After a period of some confusion the Transylvanian prince István Báthory (Stefan Batory, 1533–86) was elected to the Polish monarchy. It is known that Kochanowski participated in the elections of the Sejm at around this time. He seems to have at first favoured the nomination of a Habsburg to follow the departed Henri de Valois, or even one of Ivan the Terrible’s sons, but when this did not materialize he endorsed Báthory and became a close friend to Jan Zamoyski, Báthory’s Chancellor. Chancellor Zamoyski was an interesting choice of friend since he had been a Protestant in his youth, later became a Calvinist and then converted to Catholicism. Two of his four wives were Calvinist. When he married Krystina Radziwiłł (the daughter of a prominent Protestant) in 1578, his wife did not convert to Catholicism for another two years. Under the terms of the Council of Trent, which had been accepted by the Polish Catholic Church only the previous year, this marriage was a mortal sin (Tazbir, 1973: 127). In light of this, it is surely significant that Kochanowski’s classical play Odprawa posłów greckich (‘The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys’) was commissioned for and performed at performed at the wedding, and that King István Báthory was present.

Ivan the Terrible had just invaded the Duchy of Livonia, and Poland was preparing for war. Kochanowski was not given to prophetic utterance, and while his play was generally pacifist in tone, nevertheless at one point the character of Ulysses shouts: ‘Oh, thou lawless kingdom, on the verge of destruction.’ At the end of the performance a Latin poem called Orpheus Sarmaticus, was declaimed, voicing Kochanowski’s growing unease at the behaviour of the szlachta:

Poles, what hopes and designs do you nourish in your hearts?

This is no time for laziness, no time for sleep, believe me; neither

For festivities with a lute, a cup or light dances.

From the east, the rider throws his poisoned arrows, he is as dangerous in attack as in flight.

He leads his troops from the hyperborean fields.

He is hardened in the Ural snows and frosts of his country.

And if I am to tell the truth, his glory is due only to your inertia.

His are allies who, using false talk, enter into alliance with you

but in their hearts hide thoughts of war.

Envy and deceived hopes torture their souls.

(Miłosz, 1983: 74)

Kochanowski was commenting on a phenomenon which has since come to be known as ‘Sarmatianism’. The Sarmatians were an Iranian people who migrated out of Asia in the sixth to fourth centuries BC and were noticed by classical writers in the second century BC. They are said to have invaded southern Russia and Poland, where they settled, around AD 200–500, conquering the local population. They clashed with the Goths, were then conquered by the Huns in AD 370 and seem to have disappeared without trace after that. However, by AD 1200 Sarmatian property signs known as tamgas began to appear on Polish heraldic devices. The history of the Sarmatians was largely unknown to Kochanowski, but it was from a supposed Sarmatian warrior caste that the Polish szlachta claimed descent. The complex of dogmas that supposed the szlachta to be under special protection from God, and that they had only to dispense law and maintain their own golden freedoms, may be termed Sarmatianism.

The szlachta saw their function as the ownership of the land, which was after all at that time the ‘grain basket of Europe’, from which they mainly derived their livelihood, while the peasantry remained in ignorance and poverty. From the sixteenth century onwards, when Sarmatian mythology was probably at its most influential, Poland began to fall behind the developing economies of Western Europe. While Kochanowski cannot have known this, he had intuited that this set of attitudes would not in the long run profit the state or the people. Kochanowski then went on to describe the Turks, who after the conquest of Rhodes had advanced along the Danube and the Dniestr, and now, he said, eyed Podolia greedily. He ended by praising King István Báthory as a man trained and ready for military action. While the play was in Polish, a language the king did not speak, the poem was in Latin, a language he understood well.

However, his personal friendship with Zamoyski cannot have eased by very much the business of practical politics. It seems likely that Kochanowski had supported Zygmunt II Augustus’s foreign policy of friendship with Turkey and Sweden against Muscovy, but otherwise he had little interest in power struggles at court. With the sudden changes of monarch he must have felt the political ground shifting under him. Inevitably Báthory promoted a Catholic Counter-Reformation, but he did this without provoking an extreme reaction from Protestants. Kochanowski’s poetry from this period is full of favourable references to Báthory, and he certainly seems to have approved of Báthory’s hands-off approach to domestic politics.

The death of King Zygmunt II Augustus, the fiasco of Henri’s brief reign, the undignified competition surrounding the election of Báthory and the fact that the Polish state now faced a declining grain trade, hostile Tatars in Crimea and Ruthenia, Cossacks on the Dniepr, a revolt in Danzig, the steadily rising power of the Prussian state, the looming inevitability of a long war with Muscovy, and the possibility of further Turkish incursions from the Balkans up into the Polish possessions in the Ukraine, all helped to loosen Kochanowski’s ties to the court. He did not even write an elegy when King Zygmunt died. Kochanowski spent more and more time on his estate. Sometime around 1574 Kochanowski retired to Czarnolas. The following year, aged 45, he married Dorota Podłodowska and went on, according to some accounts, to father four daughters or perhaps, according to other accounts, six girls and a boy. However as Báthory’s campaign against Ivan the Terrible (1579–81) commenced, Kochanowski forsook his retirement and – along with Zamoyski – became an enthusiastic propagandist for the Polish cause, even if in Latin.

After this Kochanowski became a contemplative country squire and, his rural routine interrupted only by the occasional visit to court, set about preparing his complete works for publication. He was aware that, like many other nobles, he was no longer in the service of his country in quite the same way as he had been, and he commented in one of his satires that when a country squire polished his armour, it was generally to have his portrait painted rather than to defend the country. Kochanowski’s relationship with his lands, like that of most members of the szlachta, was intense, oddly sentimental and determinedly parochial. His love and pride in his estate and his local knowledge are displayed in many of his poems:

Dear Guest, sit down beneath my leaves and take your rest.

The sun will not strike you there, I do insist,

Though it beat from its noonday height, and its direct rays

Should pierce such scattered shade as a tree bestows.

There a cooling breeze is always blowing from the field;

There, nightingales and blackbirds their tuneful tales unfold.

It’s from my fragrant blossom that the tireless bees

Take honey, which later ennobles your lordly feasts;

Whilst I, by my soft murmurs, can easily contrive

That gentle sleep overtake the unsuspecting fugitive.

It’s true, I bear no fruit; but in my master’s eyes

My worth exceeds the richest scion of the Hesperides.

(Davies, 1981: 241)

This is not a poem about the nature of the landscape, nor is it the idealized or politicized landscape of ‘the homeland’, such as the poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) was later to produce in Pan Tadeusz (1834) at the time of the partitions. Kochanowski’s point is decidedly local: to emphasize that a man in harmony with his heart and his home can enjoy a heightened sense of natural beauty. However, while we have no reason to suppose that Kochanowski was anything other than a sensible rather than brutal squire, delightful though it is, in the end the poem is a szlachta idyll where no inconvenient peasant spoils the view.

Kochanowski is credited as a pivotal figure in the Polish intellectual Renaissance and with being the creator of modern Polish vernacular poetry. As one of a handful of well-educated, well-travelled Polish humanists, there is little doubt that Kochanowski was one of the finest and most important writers of the Polish Renaissance – and quite possibly the most eminent Slav poet until the early nineteenth century. Though almost all the works of the first 30 years of his life were written in Latin, he developed Polish as a literary language, finding ways in his poetry to allow greater flexibility in the rhythm, melody, vocabulary and subject matter. Kochanowski single-handedly challenged the medieval ‘approximate-syllabic’ verse system, whereby ‘imperfect’ stressed and unstressed syllables were rhymed. His verse was strictly syllabic, with precise and rigorous rhymes, regular line-breaks, and an accentuation matching the spoken language which allowed interplay to develop between syntax and verse structure, emotional content and literary form.

The dominance of Latin in educated Polish circles was almost total. During Kochanowski’s lifetime Polish Cardinal Stanislas Hosius chided Polish Bishop Jakub Uchański for attempting to write to him about theological matters in Polish rather than Latin. Kochanowski is said to have apologized once for writing a letter in Polish (Burke, 2004: 43, 72). Consequently almost everything Kochanowski wrote in Polish was a ‘first’ in Polish literature. In terms of writing, Kochanowski’s retirement to Czarnolas was very successful and this was to be his most productive period. His collection of Latin verse Lyricorum libellus (1580) was followed by a political treatise Wrózki (‘Fortune Tellers’, 1583), and by a historical poem Jazda do Moskwy (‘Trip to Moscow’, 1583). His collected Fraszki (‘Trifles’, 1584, after the Italian frasca) consisted of over 300 court verses, epigrams, maxims, anecdotes, drinking songs, popular lyrics, philosophical questions, satires on the malpractices of the Catholic clergy, conceits and aphorisms. This was followed by the posthumous publication of his collected lyrics Piesni (‘Songs’, 1586). Kochanowski’s Psałterz Dawidów (‘David’s Psalter’, 1570–8) was to become one of the best known and best loved Polish literary works over the next two centuries. By 1641 it had appeared in 20 editions and had been set to music by Mikołaj Gomółka. Kochankowski also produced several treatises on the standardization of Polish spelling. Given the growth of literary activity in Polish and the range of Polish dialects at this time this cannot have been an idle interest. Kochanowski’s Psałterz Dawidów had much the same impact on the Polish language as Luther’s Bible had on German.

In total Kochanowski’s surviving lyrical poems and satires amount to some 16,700 verses in Polish and 7,000 more in Latin. Kochanowski is credited with seemingly irreconcilable and incompatible achievements. On the one hand his writing opened up Polish literary culture to the influence of the classics and, on the other, by innovating beyond the classical models, he also opened up Polish literary culture to a whole different set of possible forms and developments which put it in touch with the modern literature of France, Italy and Germany. By using the Polish language he created a space where Polish culture could begin to develop a vernacular literature. At the same time he endowed Polish literature with the particularities of Polish culture, experience and expression.

Treny (‘Threnodies’, 1580) is the masterpiece of Kochanowski’s Czarnolas period. The dates and order of composition of these poems is not known, but they were numbered and published by the author in his lifetime, and it is clear that they resulted from the death of his daughter Orszula, at the age of 30–36 months, towards the end of 1579. This event sent Kochanowski into an agonizing spiritual crisis. Grief afflicted him very badly, and dealing with it through the production and publication of Treny delayed the appearance of his ‘Trifles’ and ‘Songs’.

In Treny Kochanowski applied the Greek form of epicedium or threnos, the formal funeral ode or lament for a great and distinguished person. The form had been developed by Petrarch (1304–74), but in his Poetics the Italian-French poet and critic Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558) had added the notion that the lament should be a logically organized sequence touching, in set order, on particular themes: praise of the deceased, the nature of the loss, the burden of loss, sadness, search for solace, and finally the moral message of the experience. Scaliger’s ideas had a considerable impact on Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), particularly in distinguishing between the idea of a poet as someone who simply remade traditional verses and the idea of the poet as someone who made their own ‘imaginative interventions’.

It is possible to see some traces of Scaliger’s scheme in Treny, but for the most part overwhelming personal grief led Kochanowski to boldly extend (or perhaps ignore) Scaliger’s formula. He did not apply it to an eminent personality, but to a child unknown to the public. He also applied it to his own personal misfortune. He did not write one lament, he wrote a whole cycle of poems. By challenging Scaliger’s idea of the lament, Kochanowski transformed it into something less rigid, less formally restrained and far more penetrating than it had been. These 19 poems, in Poland the best known of Kochanowski’s poetic output, are the only example of his direct expression of personal feelings – a father’s despair at the loss of a child. Though these feelings are expressed in what is still a recognizable and established poetic form, they stretch and test that form. If anything, the tension between the form and the emotion poured into it makes the poems more powerful. The poems are at once a journey through the various consecutive stages of a lonely father’s bereavement and suffering, a display of a parent’s mind torn between reason and despair, and also a Renaissance search to regain faith in religious principles and philosophical convictions in the face of the harsh realities of life and death. Essentially Kochanowski showed a humanist’s internal conflict with his own principles of conduct and recorded the intimacy of grief resolved in a poetic medieval dream vision.

The theme of these poems is not the dead daughter, but rather the highly subjective description of that daughter and the feelings she aroused in her father. Some of Kochanowski’s contemporaries criticized his writing simply because they could not recognize an established literary form, but others were scandalized by this lack of decorum. By making a public show of his grief Kochanowski undoubtedly compromised social convention, but by writing a poetic funeral elegy for an unknown child (persona levis), rather than for a well-known public figure (persona gravis), he had offended against poetic convention too. Some claimed that this was such a radical step that Kochanowski must have invented a dead daughter on which to base the poetry. But it is hard to imagine Kochanowski behaving this way and almost impossible to believe that he invented the child. Indeed it is more probable that these critics simply failed to see how the form and range of feeling in Polish poetry had actually been extended by Kochanowski’s emotional loss and by his work in turning that loss into poetry. Treny is not a poetic exercise. In contrast to his Fraszki and Piesni, in which he displayed a humanist character, busy seeking equilibrium through moderation and Stoic acceptance of whatever life brought, Treny took a very different stance, ranging from utter despair and religious doubt, via pagan scepticism, to a grudging and often enigmatic acceptance of divine will that bordered on Stoicism. His usual sedate style acquired a remarkable complexity, an inner resilience, a coiled dynamism (Kochanowski, 1995a). ¹

In Lament 1 the poet announces his loss and his reaction to it. He calls on literary tradition to aid him, invokes the tears of the philosopher Heraklitus of Ephesos (c. 540–480 BC) who considered the fate of humans to be insignificant, and the complaints of Simonides of Keos (556–468 BC), who wrote Greek treny. He moves swiftly from the call for assistance to the realization that all attempts at help are useless. He is simply inconsolable:

All Heraclitus’ tears, all threnodies

And plaintiff dirges of Simonides,

All keens and slow airs in the world, all griefs,

Wrung hands, wet eyes, laments and epitaphs,

All, all assemble, come from every quarter,

Help me to mourn my small girl, my dear daughter,

Whom cruel Death tore up with such wild force,

Out of my life, it left me no recourse.

The repetition of the word ‘all’ makes the word emphatically encompassing. It is no mere literary device. He means that his faith in the entire world, his sense of order and fitness, has been entirely shattered by this event. He likens his attempt to rear and protect his child to the vain and frantic efforts of a mother bird trying to protect her chick from the predatory snake:

What is not vain, by God, in lives of men?

All is vain! We play at blind man’s buff

Until hard edges break into our path.

Even here, right at the very start of the sequence, as a Catholic Kochanowski is bordering on a heretical rejection of God’s mercy and judgement.

In Lament 2 he says that though he would rather write for children than write for fame, he has no choice. He is oblivious ‘to everything except my grief’. He did not want to ‘sing’ for the living and now he must write for the dead. In Lament 3, in a bitter mood he accuses his dead daughter of deserting him, saying that he cannot offer her an inheritance anything like that which she deserves, and that her reward must lie in heaven, where he hopes she will await him. The poet praises the ‘deservingness’ of his daughter’s early reason, grace and virtues, her words, her curtsies, and her ‘young lady’s pose’. This cannot be realistic praise for one so young.

In Lament 4 he likens himself to Niobe, saying he could have lived on at peace:

But no, all’s changed; for when a father’s eyes

See what Niobe saw, he petrifies.

Niobe, the Greek mother of humanity, was a popular symbol of suffering and motherhood in Polish literature and iconography of the sixteenth century. Niobe, according to legend, daughter of Tantalus, wife of King Amphion of Thebes, boasted of her 14 children and taunted Leto, who had only two, Artemis and Apollo. As a result of this taunt, Artemis and Apollo took their bows and arrows and killed all of Niobe’s children – Apollo killed the boys and Artemis killed the girls. After Niobe had watched over the unburied bodies for ten days, the Gods took pity on her and buried the children. Niobe, exhausted by grief turned into a rock which wept a river of tears. After Ovid’s Metamorphosis, petrified Niobe is often identified as mount Sipylus in Lidia, Turkey.

Lament 5 compares Orszula to a leafless, branchless olive seedling cut down before she has had a chance to grow, and taken to the underworld by evil, hard-eyed Persephone, queen of the underworld and wife to Pluto. It is difficult to render this in English because in Polish Kochanowski makes use of diminutives – oliwka (olive), gałązek (twig), listków (leaves) – to heighten the emotional tone. This is in clear contrast to the plain reference to zła Persefono (bad or angry Persephone).

In Lament 6, again using a diminutive, he addresses the child as ‘little poet-heiress’, ‘dear little singer’ and ‘my Slavic Sappho’, the inheritor of his estate, heir to his ‘rarest treasure: the lute’. He praises the wit and verve of the child’s lyrics and singing. This Lament picks up the theme of her infant talent and charm announced in Lament 3 by referring to the child’s talent and by using snatches of the songs she sang. Lament 7, in Poland the most popular of the laments, is also poignant and moving, when rather than look directly at the child the poet remembers the trinkets and knick-knacks that surrounded her. This is contrasted to the oak board coffin and ‘earthen clod’ where the body now lies; instead of a bridal dowry all she enjoys is a shirt-shroud she sewed herself:

Pathetic garments that my girl once wore

But cannot anymore!

The sight of them still haunts me everywhere

And feeds my great despair.

In Lament 8, he alludes to Marcus Tullius Cicero of Arpinum (106–43 BC) and the loss of his daughter Tullia. He concentrates on his sense of loss; the emptiness of his house brings back memories of happier times. Past and present are in stark contrast:

The void that fills my house is so immense

Now that my girl is gone. It baffles sense:

We are all here, yet no one is, I feel;

The flight of one small soul has tipped the scale.

In Lament 9 through an accumulation of parallel statements the cycle begins to blend Renaissance Stoicism with Christian patience, building an intellectual structure for the sense of loss. But almost at once this balancing act proves inadequate and falls apart. Philosophical and religious ‘wisdom’ may be worth all the gold in the world, but ‘if truth is told’ wisdom is of little use to a suffering man:

To think that I have spent my life in one

Long climb towards your threshold! All delusion!

Wisdom for me was castles in the air;

I’m hurled, like all the rest, from the topmost stair.

His daughter’s death has roughly separated him from the greatest joy of his intellectual life – his search for wisdom and harmony. His years of learning and acquiring knowledge are rendered useless; his grief has made him question the very notion of philosophy.

In Lament 10 the poet asks where his daughter has gone and answers with a blend of images and beliefs drawn from Christianity and ancient mythology. The Lament refers or alludes to Greek mythology, Ovid’s retelling of the Philomel story, Plato’s Republic and Virgil’s Aeneid. The poet wonders: is his daughter singing among the angels in heaven, resting on the Island of the Blessed, ferried by Charon across the ‘lake of unhappiness’, drinking the waters of Lethe, forgetful of her father’s tears? Is she changed into a nightingale, or is she being purged in purgatory – as she died so young, he doubts that any sin could have stained her soul. Is she in Christian heaven or in the pagan underworld? Virtue and wisdom are seen to be useless in these circumstances; he just wants his daughter returned to him, and would even be happy for her spirit to haunt him:

Wherever you may be – if you exist –

Take pity on my grief. O presence missed,

Comfort me, haunt me; you whom I have lost,

Come back again, be shadow, dream, or ghost.

This does not quite catch the movement of the phrase or the feeling of the first line in Polish: Gdieśkolwiek jest, jesliś jest might also be translated as: ‘Wherever you are, if you are’. But again the thought, ‘if you exist’, subjecting hope to crucial doubt, is verging on heresy. To a Catholic the idea that, rather than begin a new existence in the afterlife, the spirit simply ceased to exist at death was simply unthinkable. The last line refers to a common Renaissance question as to the various forms apparitions might take, and is very similar to the questions asked in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (IV.iii) and Hamlet (I.iv).

In Lament 11 rather than imitate Job, the poet lashes out at pious platitudes.

‘Virtue’s a trifle!’ – stricken Brutus swore.

A trifle, yes, it is, and nothing more!

Did works of piety ever mitigate

Our destined pain? Did good once counter fate?

Some enemy, indifferent to all

Our mortal fault or merit, plots our fall.

Where his breath blows, we cannot flee or hide:

Just and unjust are brought down side by side.

Yet still we, in our arrogance, pretend

To higher faculties that comprehend

God’s mysteries.

Brutus helped assassinate Julius Caesar in 44 BC, and was then defeated by Octavian in 42 BC. Brutus was widely acclaimed as a man of virtue, but on his defeat committed suicide saying: ‘Oh miserable virtue, you were but a word.’ For Kochanowski, God’s signs and portents are not meant to be read accurately or understood – they are simply dreams that play with the intellect, rather than signs that point out the path to salvation. But this line of thought brings him to the edge of his sanity, and in the end he laments and rages:

Grief, what do you intend? Am I to be

Robbed first of joy, then equanimity?

In Lament 12 he returns to the theme of a grain of corn brought down before proper harvest time. In burying his daughter he is planting her again, but he says that it is not just his daughter he is burying, but his hope too.

In Lament 13 he develops the idea that she was like a crock of fool’s gold sent to tempt him in his dreams:

It was as if you wanted to destroy

My very soul by robbing all its joy.

In Lament 14 the poet thinks that if his daughter is in Hades he might do as Orpheus did in descending to search for Eurydice, and like Orpheus he will take his lute to help him plead with Pluto.

Where Charon poles the flood, while his boat moves

Thronged with pale shades he lands in cypress groves.

The cypress tree had been dedicated by the Romans to Pluto, king of the underworld, and, as in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the cypress was associated with funerals as the wood was often used to make coffins. The poet proposes to plead with Pluto for Orszula’s release, saying that there is no reason to pick an ‘unripe berry’ (niedoroszłej jagodzie). While he clearly refers to a Greek god in mythology, it is also possible that in his pain and despair he is also issuing a challenge and rebuke to his own God:

Yet is this god so heartless that he can

Turn a deaf ear to a despairing man?

If that is so, earth won’t see me again.

I’ll yield my own soul, find peace and remain.

For a Catholic this despair and the hint of suicide again border on mortal sin.

In Lament 15 Kochanowski calls on Erato, the muse of lyric poets, to cure his hurts with music. If not (as in Lament 4), he fears he must ‘rehearse the fate of Niobe’ after the death of her 14 offspring, and turn to a mountain of stone:

This tomb keeps no corpse; this corpse keeps no tomb;

Here the tenant is the tenant’s room.

In Lament 16, Marcus Tullius Cicero of Arpinum (106–43 BC) is the target and his Stoicism at the loss of his daughter is put on trial.

Oh error of our minds! Insane

Conceit of men! We feel no pain,

Then straight presume our reason proof

Against all grief.

In plenty we praise poverty;

In pleasure, sorrow seems to be

Easy to bear: each living breath

Makes light of Death.

But when the Parcea cease to spin

Their thread, when sorrows enter in,

When Death knocks at the door, at last

We stand aghast.

Cicero was a Roman writer and philosopher who said we should not be afraid of death but who, nevertheless, did not want to die. He claimed to be a citizen of the world but wept at being expelled from Rome, and mourned inconsolably just like any other father at the loss of his daughter Tulia, his ‘dearest pearl’. In a particularly clotted verse, the poet charges that Cicero has failed:

Your logic, O angelic pen,

Compelling to the minds of men,

Rings hollow when your soul, like mine,

Cries out in pain.

Polish does not give itself to puns very often, and when it does it is a sure sign of intense emotional stress. Here the poet uses the phrase pióro anielskie: the word pióro means both a feather and a pen – a quill. The pun is the conjunction of literary, religious, philosophical and historical tensions. A more literal translation, freed from the need of rhyme, might read:

You convinced all, but couldn’t convince yourself,

Match your thought with your deed, if you can,

Angel-quill; your soul proves the same,

Gored like mine.

‘A man is not a stone’, the poet howls and both Cicero and his philosophy are found wanting as the poet despairs that Time, the father of forgetfulness, will ever cure him.

Lament 17 is written in stanzas of eight-syllable lines and stands out from the rest of the sequence which is largely written in 13-syllable lines. Here the poet reverses the mood and issues of Christian belief take over from the problems of rejected Stoicism. The poet says at once, in a parody of Satan’s words to God about Job’s faith – ‘But put forth thine hand now and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face’ (Job 1.11) – that the Lord’s hand has touched him and has destroyed ‘all my joy’. As with Job, there is a religious crisis in the thought that pain and suffering come from God. But is this a prayer? The poet is a soul in despair, turning to the source of his happiness and his pain, confessing sins, bargaining, begging and pleading. Is it heretical to say that God’s blow shattered his bliss? That human reason cannot comprehend such behaviour? The idea that ‘the Lord’s hand’ could make his soul ‘sick’ and oppressed is surely heretical. His confession dismisses his own powers of intelligence, philosophical viewpoints and previous religious belief:

Reason, once adequate

To weigh and arbitrate

What God and life allow

Is no help to me now.

Having made it clear that God has punished him mercilessly and deprived him of all joy in the world, he concludes:

Therefore my tears flow on,

For there are things beyond

Calm Reason’s power to cope:

God is my only hope.

A more literal approach might yield a slightly different reading:

And therefore I let tears flow

Because I have lost all hope

That by reason I will be saved

God alone might this halt.

This last line, while affirming that God is the only hope of the poet, also manages to suggest very powerfully that God is no help at all. The word hamować, translated by Barańczak and Heaney as ‘hope’, means literally check, brake, restraint or impediment. The suggestion is not only that God is his only hope, but that God is the only restraint on the slide towards suicide. In Polish the effect of tension and contradiction are much more evident.

In Lament 18 Kochanowski again teeters on the edge of heresy by questioning God’s grace:

We fail to see how much your Grace attends

Our welfare; which soon ends

When your infinite Good

Is not repaid with infinite gratitude.

This becomes a psalm-like prayer addressed to God by one of his unruly children, who thinks of God only when he is unhappy, and who now begs God to show him mercy:

Oh let not your hand crush those in discord

With you, Eternal Lord …

The poet is aware of his rebellious feelings and his resentments against his God:

Though fools claim you have never been man’s friend,

Sooner the world may end

Than you shall ever scorn

A rebel soul, when broken and forlorn.

Kochanowski was clearly worried by the Catholic doctrine that souls achieve a state of grace by good works: in the case of an infant who has had no time or opportunity for good works before death, this doctrine could delay and perhaps even prevent entry into heaven. Although the Popes had spoken out to resolve this issue in the fourteenth century by saying that baptism washed away original sin and conferred grace, popular doubts lingered. Kochanowski’s fear that Orszula might not have been admitted to heaven, that his doubts may even have been responsible in some way for his daughter’s death, and his despair that even his thoughts are displeasing to God, lurk at the back of the poem. Calvinism challenged the exclusivity of the Catholic doctrine of grace through good works; it held that only faith in God would guarantee ‘election’ to Heaven: good works, the Calvinists believed, contributed little or nothing. Calvinism had begun to grow in Poland after the Synods of Słonimski and Pinczów in the years 1554–5 and it was by far the most attractive alternative to Catholicism among the Polish nobility. The Calvinists’ insistence on the more inclusive notion that a state of grace could be achieved through successful repentance or by natural innocence would probably have appealed to Kochanowski.

Lament 19, the final poem in the sequence, is subtitled ‘The Dream’. It is here that the unresolved issues of his grief find a grudging acceptance and an uneasy resolution. Though exhausted, grief has robbed the poet of sleep. When he finally does fall asleep near dawn, he dreams he sees his dead mother (Anna z Białaczowskich-Kochanowska, who died in 1557 while Kochanowski was in France) holding her granddaughter in her arms.

My Orszula, my never lovelier

Daughter, in white nightgown, gold curled hair,

Rose-petal skin, eyes bright as a new day …

The mother admonishes him for allowing grief to make a candle-wick of his mind and explains that while human life is a string of never-ending sorrows, he should understand that the child now ‘sits at God’s right hand’, and is happier than if she had lived.

You cannot see her as she is – your sight

Is mortal and sees things in mortal light –

But now your daughter shines, a morning star

Among angelic spirits.

She also has a harsh word to say about the fate of women:

My God, son,

What is there to regret? That no man won

Her dowry and her heart, then made her years

One long declension into strife and tears?

That her body wasn’t torn by labour pains?

That her experience was, is and remains

Virginal, that she got release before

She learned if birth or death mark women more?

Earthly boundaries limit earthly joys –

Heavenly joys are boundless. Paradise

Exists forever, crystalline, secure.

There happiness is absolute and pure;

There tragedy, disease, death have no place;

There tears are wiped away from every face.

We live our endless lives in endless bliss.

The poet’s mother is brutally clear that the pleasures of life and the pleasures of the afterlife are two entirely different and separate things. She makes it clear that his grief borders on selfishness, and says that instead of lamenting what he has lost, he should perhaps begin to praise what is left to him.

So dry your tears. Believe. Take comfort. Rest.

Weigh up your losses, ponder each mistake,

Yet never overlook what is at stake:

Your peace of mind, your equanimity!

However robbed of these you seem to be,

However little of a help they are

Be your own master.

She points out that in the past the poet took little pleasure from the world, preferring to pore over his books and that this, she believes, has left him emotionally ‘in arrears’. She also reminds him that in the past he had written obituary poetry to order, for the nobles Jan Twardowski and Krzysztof Radziwiłł. Then, though he knew nothing of grief, he had known how to offer solace to other people. Now the ‘master’ must cure himself. Ironically his mother insists on a kind of Stoicism.

Yet what is time’s great remedy? The wax

And wane of things, and nothing more; the flux

Of new events, now painful, now serene;

He who has grasped this accepts what has been

And what will be with equal steadfastness,

Resigned to suffer, glad to suffer less.

Bear humanly the human lot. There is –

Never forget – one Lord of blight and bliss.

Despair and shock, prostration with grief, the recovery of consciousness, the agony of memory, the search for forgetfulness, the search for happy memories of the past; pain at the sight of the child’s things, the pain of the collapse of personal philosophy, heretical notions as a consolation, the resignation to Christianity, peace of a sort in acceptance. This is not Scaliger’s poetic formula for a lament. This is a portrait of a rational, humane mind almost overwhelmed by the irrational force of grief. From this, the last poem in the sequence, which ends with the exhortation to ‘bear humanly the human lot’, and which stretches the word ‘humanly’ in several directions, we may infer that the poet has restored an uneasy balance between his Christian faith and his Stoicism, but in a peculiarly fragile way: it is to his dead mother, not antique wisdom nor the Catholic Church, that he turned for solace and for another perspective on the meaning of human suffering and the beauty of the world beyond the grave.

Around 1580, at the time Kochanowski began work on his Treny, Poland started a revival of the Catholic faith. For the most part this emphasized the more spiritual aspects of the faith and shifted emphasis away from the mundane and the political: this allowed the Jesuit order to start work in Poland. The Counter-Reformation, with its revived emphasis on the cult of Mary and the lives of the saints and its focus on the idea of salvation, was a return to a more medieval Catholic style of pietism and clericism, but this appealed to the peasantry and the lesser gentry. Against this background Kochanowski’s failure to appeal to Mary in these poems, his quiet recourse to a wider range of reference than the Catholic Church, and his insistence on finding his own way to faith seem all the more remarkable.

Secular thought in Poland was still far from free of the restraints of the medieval world and the power of the Catholic Church. Kochanowski was forced to find a way of raising himself above vicissitude, to achieve a spiritual balance that while it accepted Christianity, also, through the overwhelming concerns of his own grief, saw how limited its powers of solace were. The Catholic Kochanowski learned that, as the Stoics had taught, happiness could not be found in the material world since that was unreliable and fickle. In his Treny Kochanowski showed himself to be someone who, though he desired peace and tranquillity of mind, was challenged in a very intimate and personal manner. He was a man who, to his intense unease, found himself little better prepared for an assault on his feelings than an uneducated atheist barbarian. Like everybody else, in grief he was prey to irrationality, unpredictability and prone to question the certainties offered through his Church. Kochanowski’s Christian faith was shaken by the cruelty of his daughter’s death, and contrary to the teachings of his faith, he feared his daughter’s soul might not, after all, rest in heaven. While Kochanowski looked to the liberation of the mind promised by the Renaissance, he was nevertheless prey not only to all the frustrations and limitations of the late medieval world, but also to the doubts, disappointments and uncertainties of the emerging modern world.

The death of Orszula hit Kochanowski hard. If we are to believe the epitaph he added to Treny in 1580, he was also to lose his daughter Hanna a short time later. ² In 1584 Kochanowski published the delayed collections of his ‘Trifles’. On 22 August 1584 Kochanowski died suddenly, probably from a heart attack. He was 54. He is buried in the family vault in the parish church at Zwolen. The carving on the vault shows him with a benign face, full beard and flowing moustache, standing in a relaxed pose: and appropriately he is clutching a sheaf of papers.

Kochanowski’s influence on the national poetic, aesthetic and intellectual traditions of Poland was to remain strong throughout the seventeenth century. While Kochanowski was to help establish the legitimacy of Polish vernacular writing, and his example was to prove particularly important for writers struggling to maintain a Polish identity and the Polish language in Silesia, he had few writer contemporaries and there was no one following to match Kochanowski’s scope or talent. Kochanowski was almost the last of his generation – the best and brightest intellects of the Polish Renaissance. Mikołaj Kopernik, who had discovered that the Earth moved round the Sun, had died in 1543. Chancellor Mikołaj Rej, the other great literary figure from the period, had died in 1569. Andrzej Frycz-Modzdrzewski, who, like Kochanowski, had worked in the court secretariat, and a writer who had recommended that peasants and burghers should be treated, like the nobility, as free citizens under the law, had died in 1572. Jan Zamoyski, who came from one of the leading szlachta families, had also worked in the court secretariat: he was the architect of the system that allowed the king of Poland to reign but not to rule without the assent of the nobles, and was to live until 1605.

The English Renaissance was well under way by the time of Kochanowski’s death. In that year Edmund Spenser was 32, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney and John Lyly were 30; John Donne and Ben Jonson were both 12 years old; Thomas Nashe was 17; Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were both 20; Francis Bacon was 23 and George Chapman was 25; Thomas Middleton and John Webster were both 4. Clearly in England, though the market for writing and writers was still small, there was still much of great beauty to come – particularly in drama. And even as noble patronage for writing declined, a reading culture and a popular literary culture began to emerge, as did a theatre-going public. The years 1580 to 1630 were to see a further remarkable transformation as literature became less the product of the nobility and increasingly the work of writers who came from families previously associated with farming, the professions, tradesmen, craftsmen or merchants (Williams, 1974: 177–94, 254–7)

This was is in contrast to Poland. There the market for literature was tiny: creative or imaginative literature remained the hobby of the nobility, at court or on their distant country estates, rather than a professional career. Unlike the English experience, Polish social structure did not encourage ‘upstart crows’; literature was not of, for or about urban bustle, still less about popular culture, and Poland lacked the great urban sprawl of a city like London, which would attract talent from the countryside or help to generate writing through popular theatre. With Kochanowski’s death, the first ‘European’ poet in Polish literature departed, and the finest phase of the Polish Renaissance and its humanist literature came to an end.

Kochanowski’s achievement in Treny, particularly the humanist questioning of both Catholicism and the wisdom of the ancients, was a delicate balance of personal and religious feelings, but it was also the achievement of Kochanowski’s social stratum. His sensibility was defined partly by his personality but was also the result of the privilege of his education and travels, his position at court, the wealth of his inherited estate, his social standing. His achievement occurred at a time when szlachta and royal powers established a kind of balance, before the decline of the grain trade affected the nobles and while the great distant estates were still at their zenith. The claim for freedom of expression and tolerance stemmed from the struggle for the freedom of printing and writing. These things met in the role, function and style of the Polish nobility. The szlachta used the liberating effect of Luther and Calvin to articulate a challenge to the power of the Catholic Church and to further their personal liberties in intellectual and political matters. For a few ‘golden’ years these strands combined to the advantage of the nobility. Kochanowski’s career and his lament for his lost child occur at this pivotal moment, just as the political and military confidence, szlachta charm, privilege, ease and confident toleration that allowed his writing to flourish began to encounter forces that would change them completely. That moment – literary, historical, political, economic and religious – did not last long, but its effects took a long time to fade. However, the Polish Commonwealth was already under pressure and perhaps already in decline.

The Catholic Church quietly waited out the tide of the Reformation and then, from the late 1560s, led by Cardinal Hosius, who was fundamentally opposed to violence, quietly set about its return. The Poles managed to avoid the experience of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Tudor England – doctrinal chaos under Henry VIII, a destructive ‘cultural revolution’ under the young King Edward VI, the public burning of more than 500 ‘heretics’ under Mary Tudor, war with Catholic Spain and the search for recusant Catholics under Elizabeth I. In Poland there was no inquisition, no anathema, no religious terrorism, no forfeiture of property, no public burning and no one was barred from office – features normally associated with the Counter-Reformation in Western Europe. However, while foreign religious groups like the Czech Brethren were often tolerated more easily than domestic radicals, Polish Protestants, where they were not members of the nobility, still required the protection of the szlachta. In contrast to most of Europe, for a while Poland appeared still to be a place of relative toleration – active toleration rather than passive tolerance. When in 1572 a Calvinist chapel was burned down in Kraków, five Catholics were convicted and beheaded as an example: local Catholics then took up a subscription to enable rebuilding (Zamoyski, 1989: 91). In 1573 the Confederation of Warsaw declared: ‘We who differ in matters of religion will keep the peace among ourselves.’ Although things were to change later, Poland for a while still continued to provide a home for all kinds of religious sects.

In 1586 Báthory died and Sigismund III Vasa was elected. In 1595 fire damaged the Wawel Castle and the king – who was also king of Sweden – took advantage of this to move the court to Warsaw. Kraków now found itself on the edge of a very large territory; Warsaw, located much more centrally and certainly much closer to Sweden, thrived. The kings of Poland continued to be buried in Kraków, but that was all. For Kraków this was the start of a long slow decline, but the success of the Counter-Reformation meant that the building of churches nevertheless continued at the rate of one church every three years and one monastery every two years: by the mid 1660s Kraków had 64 churches (Adamczewski, 1973; 26–7). However it is at precisely this time that the forces of reaction start to define Polishness by reference to religion. Successive parliaments brought about the end of freedom of conscience in Poland with – among other measures – the expulsion of the Czech Brethren, the banishment of the Antitrinitarians, prohibition on conversion to Calvinism and (after the model suggested by England, the Netherlands and Scandinavia) banishment for anyone leaving the Catholic Church. Janusz Tazbir has identified the year in which Polish religious tolerance came to an end as 1668 (Tazbir, 1973: 197).

The tolerance shown so far in Poland was limited not by the religious interests of the szlachta or even those of the gentry. By and large the humanist tolerance of this period was deeply felt, but was nevertheless strategic and pragmatic: it melded well with the ideology and privilege of the szlachta and with the aspirations of the gentry and was in its own way an instrument in the szlachta’s struggles over political rather than religious privilege: this, it became clear, was in turn dependent on the politics of the noble estate – threats to noble privilege and the wealth generated by the grain trade – and by external pressure (Tazbir, 1973: 208–9). It is in Kochanowski’s lifetime that the roots of Poland’s later difficulties begin to emerge, but it is in the seventeenth century, just after his death, that it becomes clear that the szlachta ‘virtues’ that had produced and nourished Kochanowski, in other circumstances could be their very opposite. Polish military prowess, while it protected Poland from external aggression, could not do so entirely or for ever, and military ardour could not resolve mounting internal political and economic pressures.

For Poland the seventeenth century saw the start of more than a hundred years of war – repeated invasions by Muscovy, a Cossack uprising in the Ukraine, a Swedish invasion in 1655–60, action against Peter the Great in the Great Northern War of 1700–21 followed by war against the Turks (Halecki, 1950: 159; Ascherson, 1987: 20–1). None of these clashes persuaded the szlachta that their day had gone or that a new system of government was required. The right of opposition to the throne was increasingly invoked, often for trivial and personal reasons, and effective central government became more difficult. For many of the szlachta this meant only that competition between the great families became fiercer and the necessity for foreign allies, to the detriment of Poland’s ability to govern itself through a central authority, became even greater. Only with the first partition of Poland in 1772, when Russia, Prussia and Austria took huge bites out of Polish territory, did they begin to understand. However, if this event focused the minds of some on the perils of their situation and pushed them to attempt reform, it caused many of the szlachta to flee Poland for residence abroad and others to recoil and redouble their efforts to hang on to privilege rather than alter their ways.

Perhaps the noblest action of those szlachta remaining in Poland on 3 May 1791 was to pass the new Constitution: the Sejm rule on unanimity was abolished; the throne was made hereditary rather than elective; a Cabinet was established; citizens in the towns were granted the same rights as the nobility; and the peasants were protected under law. If this had ever been put into practice it would have transformed Poland and done much to bring it into line with political developments in Western Europe. However, by this time Russia, Prussia and Austria all found it unthinkable that a strong, centralized, democratic state might flourish on their borders. A second partition of Polish territory took place in 1793, before the constitutional reforms could be effected, and with the third partition in 1797 Poland disappeared from the map entirely for a period of 123 years. After this, under steady pressure from the partitioning powers, an increasingly staunch and bristling nationalist Catholicism became the hallmark of an ‘authentic’ Polish identity. It was, Polish Romantic writers were to make clear, as if Poland and Polish culture had ‘descended into a grave’.

However, the attempt by the partitioning powers to abolish the szlachta was to misfire hopelessly. In the Prussian and Russian partition areas, rather than abandon their religion and their language, the Polish peasantry began to sympathize and identify common interests with the nobility, and this, instead of removing them, allowed szlachta attitudes, opinions and values, subtly changed by partition, to migrate and feed into a much wider range of Polish society, and particularly to find a home in literary culture. Inevitably Polish literature during the partition years shifted from court satire and religious debate; it ceased to be the leisure pursuit of the country squire; instead it often became a ‘national’ issue, concerned for the revival of Poland, the survival of the language and the preservation of Polish identity. At the same time the experience of partition massively undermined the Renaissance idea of a multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-religious Poland. In reaction to partition, and with consequences for the minorities, Polish identity moved towards the belief that it was somehow inseparably and exclusively bound up with a particular variety of szlachta opinion – an oppositional kind of arch, conservative, pietistic Catholic patriotism – and that this was the norm of Polish identity. The Poland that emerged from partition at the end of Word War I, though it harked back to the figures of the ‘golden years’ of the Renaissance, was very different from the Poland Kochanowski had written about, as was the Catholicism by which it set such store.