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Friday 5 December 2008

A Country in the Moon: Travels in the Heart of Poland

Flying bison and half a cup of coffee

Shelby Tucker on Michael Moran's new book

The jacket cover tells us that

we keep company with a gallery of fantastic characters — Tatars and Teutonic Knights, Napoleon’s mistress and daredevil Spitfire pilots, robbers and . . . heroic defenders of freedom.

True, but what I enjoyed most were the pictures of the unheroic, such as the nobleman who was apt to shoot disagreeable dinner guests and whose

other favourite armed activity was shooting ‘flying bison’. His servants catapulted these huge creatures into the air from massive launchers hidden in the primeval forest surrounding his castle. Karol [Radziwill] would take careful aim and fire . . . and unfailingly brought down his quarry.

As tensions mounted in 1914, Emperor Wilhelm II repined to a Polish countess that he was fearfully misunderstood. The countess, née Mary-Theresa Olivia Cornwallis-West, noted that ‘a tear fell on his cigar’.

I first visited Warsaw in 1957. It was then a sprawl of devastation. Retreating from the Red Army, the Wehrmacht expelled the remaining population and destroyed it. Guided by an 18th-century Venetian painter’s precisely observed pictures, the Poles cleared the rubble and restored it, and the beautiful city that I found on returning there in 1988 is now a Unesco World Heritage site. Moran entitles the chapter concerning this remarkable resurrection ‘Warsaw the Phoenix’.

There is so much to admire in this well-researched and hugely entertaining book, and so much to learn. Certainly, I did not know that Poles regard their country as ‘the reincarnation of the suffering Christ’. That Schumann described Chopin’s music as ‘cannons hidden among flowers’. That the national composer of Poland left Poland at the age of 20, never to return. That Polish aristocrats once claimed descent from nomadic archers of Iranian stock related to the Scythians. That under communism, Poles could buy half a cup of coffee if they were too poor to afford a full cup. That many Poles hold that entry into the European Union was ‘the onset of moral decay’.

I have some criticisms. There is too much about the ‘Holocaust’, yet nothing new except the Polish spelling of Auschwitz. Moran’s handling of dialogue is sometimes a little clumsy, a curious shortcoming in such a talented writer. That said, if you fancy elegant erudition, A Country in the Moon is a three-star feast.

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