From the manor court to the university cathedral. A contribution to the genesis of the Polish intelligentsia

Abstract

Landowners and intelligence are two layers of Polish society that had complemented each other and played an important role in maintaining of the Polishness in the era of partitions, and seriously contributed to regaining independence in 1918. An educated landowner, or an intellectual of landowner origin, it was often difficult to define belonging to a particular social layer. After the January Uprising, publicists were writing about gentry as “country intelligentsia”, which had to play an important role in the modernization of the Polish countryside. In the light of the previous findings of historiography, it appears that indeed the landowning environment became one of the main groups of recruitment of the Polish intelligentsia in the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. An analysis of the sources of various provenance shows that one of the most important intellectual professional groups, to which were getting first sons and then daughters from the landowners families, were scientists. The main research problem is the attempt to characterize people of science, who had abandoned the mansions and decided to pursue a career at universities in Cracow, Lviv and Warsaw, and after independence, also Poznań, Vilnius and Lublin. This issue will be discussed both in the broader context of collective fates as well as selected individual biographies of Polish scholars on landed genealogy. An important selection criterion will be their simultaneous involvement in various political and social ventures.