Poland Takes the Plunge

During the season of its first flowering, at the outset of this decade, Halina Bortnowska, one of the foremost theorists of Polish Solidarity, characterized the movement as an expression of the country’s “subjectivity,” by which, she went on to explain, she meant Poland’s renewed capacity for acting “as the subject instead of the object of its history.” The distinction was a fertile one—and perhaps most evocative at a purely grammatical level. Almost continuously for the past two centuries, and certainly throughout the last two generations, Poland, tragically wedged as it was between the German and Russian dynamos, had been forced to receive the actions of other people’s sentences, hardly ever ...