Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, 1872-1905

by Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder opens a new path in the understanding of modern nationalism and twentieth-century socialism by presenting the often overlooked life of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, an important Polish thinker at the beginning of the twentieth century. During his brief life in Poland, Paris, and Vienna, Kelles-Krauz influenced or infuriated most of the leaders of the various socialist movements of Central Europe and France. His central ideas ultimately were not accepted by the socialist mainstream at the time of his death. However, a century later, we see that they anticipated late twentieth-century understanding on the importance of nationalism as a social force and the parameters of socialism in political theory and praxis. Kelles-Krauz was one of the only theoreticians of his age to advocate Jewish national rights as being equivalent to, for example, Polish national rights, and he correctly saw the struggle for national sovereignty as being central to future events in Europe. This was the first major monograph in English devoted to Kelles-Krauz, and it includes maps and personal photographs of Kelles-Krauz, his colleagues, and his family.

Genres: History, Politics, Biography, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Audiobook, Biography Memoir

349 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 15, 1998

About the author

Timothy Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. He has held fellowships in Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard.

His most recent book is Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, published in September 2015 by Crown Books. He is author also of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), a history of Nazi and Soviet mass killing on the lands between Berlin and Moscow. A New York Times bestseller and a book of the year according to The Atlantic, The Independent, The Financial Times, the Telegraph, and the New Statesman, it has won twelve awards including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought.

His other award-winning publications include Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1998); The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (2003); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (2005); The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of A Habsburg Archduke (2008), and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010).

Snyder helped Tony Judt to compose a thematic history of political ideas and intellectuals in politics, Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012). He is also the co-editor of Stalin and Europe: Terror, War, Domination and Wall Around the West: State Power and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America (2001).

Snyder was the recipient of an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2015. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and sits on the advisory council of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research Research.

He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in modern East European political history.

Reviews

[Christiana Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first time I’ve read a biography that was written as a doctoral dissertation, and that was an experience I didn’t know I was getting myself in for! Given the academic nature of the text, which is very outside my areas of expertise (marxism, socialism, Polish political history around the turn of the 20th century), it was a bit advanced for me. However, while some content very much went over my head, it was oddly still a helpful introduction to some of these topics and a pleasant introduction to Timothy Snyder! I’m glad I will move from this to some of his very popular books rather than the other way around. I also was surprised by how much I enjoyed his introduction to the second edition, and how that positively colored my perception of the rest of the book.

I’ll finish with a few random thoughts:
- I’d never considered the advantages of jumping straight into a complex topic and skipping a more general introduction. A 101 course involves a lot of synthesis of facts that are presented as a simplified version of the truth. While there is certainly still interpretation happening here, it was about such minutiae that I (maybe?) enjoyed more freedom from sweeping opinions by the author and could integrate this little chunk of knowledge I’ve gained without being given an explicit framework.
- l can understand why this book was referenced by The Gates of Europe, despite being extremely tangential to a history of Ukraine. I believe that’s why I added it to my to read list, and it did not disappoint. This was such a nice counterpoint to a book that covers hundreds to thousands of years of history.
- The time period of this biography overlaps with the other most recent biography I’ve read (the first two volumes of Theodore Roosevelt’s biography by Edmund Morris) and what a jarring comparison of two men living at the same time.
- The Russification of Polish public education described in Kelles-Krauz’s era is reminiscent of recent attempts to re-educate Ukrainian children who have been kidnapped or otherwise forcibly deported to Russia since their invasion of Ukraine. It is so disheartening watch this kind of history repeat.

[Paige McLoughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who would have thought that a lot of second international Polish Socialists from the early 1900s would have such a vibrant philosophical and literary political culture? Awesome book on the life of Kazimierz Krauz a Polish Socialist thinker and activist who died in 1905 whose life in Poland made him think hard about the problems of worker solidarity of socialism and nationalist aspirations of the people of Poland so long abused by the German neighbor to the west and the Russian neighbor to the east. Of course, this was before the disasters of the 30s and 40s but Krauz was ahead of his time and had his antennae tuned to this tension between nationalism and socialism that would leave pockmarks in much of the world and cause turmoil to this day. Excellent biography a thinker who should get more press.
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READING PROGRESS
December 23, 2020 – Started Reading
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55.0% "the inability of Socialists to recognize the power and salience of nationalism was one of the early mistakes or socialists strategists of the early twentieth century second international socialists. Leaving an opportunity for fascists to fill this gap. Neglecting worker's feelings nationalist sentiment was a gaffe that let fascism arise as a competitor for worker loyalty. Kraus recognized this early.,"
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60.0% "Damn ignoring Nationalist sentiment in Central Europe was a big blind spot on the part of second International socialists of the early twentieth century Krausz saw it and thought he could deal with it strategically. A path of the early twentieth century not taken. imagine Socialists dispensing with the fascist problem in its cradle."
December 24, 2020 –
60.0% "Imagine if pre-WWI socialists understood in the short term nationalist feeling (in cases of warfever like WWI) could Trump worker solidarity. The strategies socialists could have adopted during WWI and the 1920s could have dealt with nationalist hence fascist challenges before they arose. We could have had a very different twentieth century."
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December 24, 2020 – Shelved as: biography
December 24, 2020 – Shelved as: early-twentieth-century
December 24, 2020 – Shelved as: european-history
December 24, 2020 – Shelved as: nineteenth-century
December 24, 2020 – Shelved as: philosophy
December 24, 2020 – Shelved as: politics
December 24, 2020 – Finished Reading

[Maks Minkowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Za często autor ulega pokusie znacznego odbiegania od tematu - tytułowego bohatera.

[Bohdan Pechenyak · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent examination of the competing claims of socialism and nationalism at the turn of the 20th century, through the prism of biography. Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz was a brilliant revolutionary thinker and one of the founders of the Polish Marxism, who also grappled with the national question in an inclusive and nuanced way, advocating for national liberation of all the nationalities (Ukrainians, Jews, Lithuanians, Belarusians, and others.

His early death due to tuberculosis in 1905, just as the first revolution in the Russian empire was bringing in a period of transformation, left a gaping hole and had a profound effect on further development of the PPS, the main socialist party in Poland. Friends with Piłsudski, Woicechowski and other prominent figures of the period (such as Renner and Millerand), he would most certainly have played an important role in the interwar period, had he survived.

Still, his writings left a substantial legacy of progressive sociological thinking about the dilemmas facing the nationalities in Eastern and Central Europe. Forgotten soon after his death, due to a whirlwind of dramatic and historic events, he had foreseen many developments that took place in the 20th century and is highly relevant till this day (perhaps more so than during his life).

This background is indispensable to anyone looking to gain a clearer understanding of the ideas and practices developed in the wake of the French Revolution, ushering in modernity. These problematic questions of simultaneously meeting social and national needs of a people are still part and parcel of everyday life today.

[Kris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I listened to this on audiobook after reading Snyder's Bloodlands. The narrator (Norman Dietz) was great and the biography was thorough, if dry.
I'd never heard of Kelles-Krauz, described as a "Polish thinker" (to be described as a "thinker" should probably be a goal) and the intersection of nationalism and Marxism against a backdrop of pre-Soviet revolution caught my attention.
Unfortunately, I was out of my league as Snyder goes deeper on the political and national issues of Kelles-Krauz's day more so than the details of the life of the Polish thinker. That's not a knock either; as the title makes it clear what Snyder will focus on.
For me though, and I'd assume for others unfamiliar with Polish independence, the role of Russia in late 1800s Poland, and an alphabet soup of political party acronyms, this was a 301 course when I really needed the 101.

Snyder's research and scholarship are top notch, but this was too advanced for a neophyte such as myself.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but specialist piece of history writing by Snyder. Be sure to check out his excellent work on Eastern Europe in WWII, the holocaust, tyranny, Ukraine:

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
On Tyranny and On Ukraine: Lessons from Russia's War on Ukraine

[Paige McLoughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who would have thought that a lot of second international Polish Socialists from the early 1900s would have such a vibrant philosophical and literary political culture? Awesome book on the life of Kazimierz Krauz a Polish Socialist thinker and activist who died in 1905 whose life in Poland made him think hard about the problems of worker solidarity of socialism and nationalist aspirations of the people of Poland so long abused by the German neighbor to the west and the Russian neighbor to the east. Of course, this was before the disasters of the 30s and 40s but Krauz was ahead of his time and had his antennae tuned to this tension between nationalism and socialism that would leave pockmarks in much of the world and cause turmoil to this day. Excellent biography a thinker who should get more press.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent biography of a socialist, Kelles-Kraus, who displayed a variation of socialism which advocated for the important of democracy for the facilitation of Marxism and advocated from the rights of Polish people. Snyder demonstrates, with this biography, that Marxism was a nuanced, layered phenomenon which allowed for differences in articulation and understanding of such topics as nationalism or democracy.

[Brian Mikołajczyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, a Polish socialist who developed many theories and prediction while also being one of the founding members of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS).
He lived in Radom and Vienna most of his life and influenced other contemporaries like Piłsudski and Rosa Luxembourg.
A great biography with a lot of interesting political and national theory!

[Stephen Tubbs · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was not familiar with Kelles-Krauz nor with much of the social movements during his time in Europe, therefore, the reading was hard work overall. A second reading would I am sure reap more benefits.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5)

[Jola Cora · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such an incredibly important work! So much to think about and what a wonderful person ❤️

[Krzysztof Katkowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very decent monograph about one of the founding fathers of Eastern European materialist sociology.