Czartoryska maintained affairs with the most important of the then Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Her husband drove her to the castle [WYWIAD]

Mieszko Marek Czarnecki: The lawyer woke up one day and wanted to write a political thriller set in the Stanisław times. He sat down at the keyboard, and after a few months the suspenseful novel was ready. But that’s when the stairs started.

Krzysztof P. Czyzewski: Today it is much easier to place a novel full of romantic, biographical and moral themes on bookstore shelves than an adventure or thriller. This is what the discussions with the publisher of “Izabela” lasted the longest. I wanted a sensational story set in historical realities, where crinolines and romances will not come to the fore, but the action will be fast, and on the last page the reader will be wiser for a lot of facts that he was not aware of until now.

And on top of that, a novel about feminist optics.

A lot of people say that, but I don’t think so in the slightest. It’s just history. We cannot talk about our past, omitting and keeping half of it in silence. I’m not talking about any quotas, about women’s stories. There is no history of women or history of men – there is one story. If we do not write about men and women when writing about the past or setting the action in it, then there will simply be no history. Izabela Czartoryska, and earlier her grandmother, also Izabela, but from the Morsztyn family, creating the political salon of Familia, were the driving force of modern thought about the Polish state. Similarly, Dorota Armknecht and Maria Teresa Tyszkiewiczowa, wonderful women from the absolute center of contemporary politics. They gave space and a pretext for their guys with titles and privileges to meet and discuss what was most important for the then Republic of Poland. It was at Izabela Czartoryska’s in the Blue Palace that Małachowski, Kołłątaj and Potocki forged the final text of the Constitution of May 3. Let us remember that without the king of Poland, Anna Jagiellon, and her Transylvanian husband, Stefan Batory, there would be no most important city in northern Europe in the 17th century – Gdańsk, so without Izabela there would be no first Polish museum, the second European constitution and the Kościuszko Uprising.

And at the same time, for their purposes, these women reached for the whole range of instruments belonging to them – from brawls and blackmail to platonic and not only romances. Plus intrigues, secrets, missions, tricks.

Izabela Czartoryska and Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski Maria Louisa Catherine Cecilia Cosway – www.revistadearte.com, public domain; Józef Peszka – www.pinakoteka.zascianek.pl, public domain, Wikimedia.org

So Mr. Automobile for adults.

A bit like that, but it only results from what Izabela Czartoryska was like. Both in life and in the book. She traveled all over Europe, collecting all possible “hovels”, as she called them: from the chair on which William Shakespeare sat, through meteorites, the origin of which has been a mystery to mankind since antiquity, to knick-knacks related to Enlightenment thinkers. Czartoryska’s admiration for works of art and memory-building artifacts was enriched with an increasingly deeper and clearer mysticism, which in a dozen or so years was to explode along with Romanticism. Fascinating time on the threshold of possibly the most important changes in human history.

Following the fate of Izabela Czartoryska, one can trace the whole of Poland with one’s finger on the map, both at that time and today.

Half of her came from the Polonized Prussian nobility, so when someone is sunbathing on the beach in Trzęsacz or Rewal, they pass the palaces of her family every day. When she goes on a summer vacation to Międzyzdroje or Dziwnów, she sees from the windows the lands belonging to her uncles and grandparents. When his holidays take him to Puławy, it is largely because Izabela decided that she had had enough of Warsaw, and it was in Puławy that she created the most important center of culture, art, and politics of the late 18th century in Poland. When traveling from castle to castle in Lower Silesia, we can use the guide written by her two hundred years ago. Ba! If not for Izabela, her son would not have brought the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Polish collection, which we can admire today at Pijarska Street in Krakow.

Is it, then, that those who are forty, fifty or sixty today miss literature written seriously, but still in the style of Zbigniew Nienacki?

I miss! And probably not only me, since Netflix will soon present its version of the story that we can remember from black and white films with Stanisław Mikulski. What Nienacki did very well was summer. Of course, there were adventures, secrets, fast-paced action, but with a tear in my eye I recall in my imagination this tent, this soda, the sun. And no ticking clock.

That is why today it is easy to create a sensational plot set in the realities of history, where for twenty-four hours she and he run, policemen betray, spies plot, but at the end the Holy Grail or some crystal shard still find their place. I wanted to write a novel that shows the reader that the places they pass by every day and which they seem to know hide true secrets from the world. And then the everyday life of the reader will take on a completely different dimension, full of youthful emotions.

However, you throw “Izabela” into the middle of a political vortex that was supposed to wipe the Republic of Poland off the map. The world was going up in flames.

The Commonwealth then inevitably headed towards something that, in my opinion, began in the mid-seventeenth century, when a handful of Cossacks showed the world how inefficient and weak the kingdom ruled from Warsaw was. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, softened by the Ukrainian movement, began to be plucked one by one by Swedes, Turks, and Muscovites, and the seemingly large and proud kingdom proved to be merely a loose federation of principalities, where any magnate was able to put out more sabers and barrels than the king, and its income was at least comparable to the entire income of the Commonwealth. This allowed the magnates to conduct their own foreign policy, not to mention the internal one. They did not put a crown on their own heads, because it simply did not pay off.

Except that Izabela Czartoryska’s husband, Adam Kazimierz, wanted the throne in Warsaw.

Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski was mannered. He would most graciously become a king if the crown climbed onto his temple by itself. He had a courage that a few months ago – please forgive the trip to the present day – many would compare to the courage of Jarosław Gowin.

Exactly. Isn’t it the case that nothing has changed in the years in which “Izabela” takes place?

People’s personalities are what they are. Power uses the same tools. Influence on rulers is exercised in exactly the same way. And those whose pockets are open to foreign ducats want to defend independence the most. It is so today, but it was so in the times of my beloved Izabela Czartoryska, and just after the Battle of Grunwald and the defeat at the Malbork Castle, when the treaty ending that war was negotiated near my beloved Toruń.

Fashions changed, messengers changed to text messages and emails, Latin to English or Chinese, crossbows to drones, but really everything was already there. For obvious reasons, time flows faster today, but the essence of politics, intrigue, wars, has remained exactly the same. Powers have their agents, individual groups have their interests, and the shoemaker has to thread the thread into another pair of shoes every day, and the farmhand has his piece of field to plow.

We are anachronistic and conceited. We think those before us were dumber, their horizons and ideas less fanciful. We like to say that this is progress and awareness now. Not true. Just as many of the tools of intrigue and politics from three or six hundred years ago are still relevant today, many of today’s views could easily function as mainstream in the darkness of the Middle Ages.

Czartoryski residence in Puławy. Konstanty Czartoryski’s watercolor from 1842 Konstanty Czartoryski – public domain, Wikimedia.org

So, thinking about Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki, who presented himself as a true defender of the traditional and healthy order of the Republic of Poland, but who almost openly accepted a salary from across the eastern border, do I hear a story about today’s reality?

Yeah! In my opinion, it’s exactly the same. Once I thought about it more deeply and came to the conclusion that since the Russians came out of state diapers, at the latest in the middle of the 17th century, Moscow has at least co-created since then, if it does not define the political reality on the Vistula in any way. And this is during subsequent elections, and this is when introducing or threatening to introduce their own troops, and this is due to huge assets transferred in one way or another to the pockets of the Polish elites each time.

And how does Izabela Czartoryska find herself on the pages of your book? A state-building agent with a hundred faces?

For two hundred years, Czartoryska has been accused of sleeping with Repnin (Nikołaj Repnin, representative of Catherine II in Warsaw in the times of Stanisław August Poniatowski, in fact a protectorate over the interests of the Russian Empire in the Commonwealth – editor’s note). Because she liked him, or maybe because there was no other way to build influence in Moscow? When evaluating, we must always remember the principles, especially the moral ones, that were in force at that time. Let’s not forget that Józef Piłsudski changed his religion twice in order to be able to enter into further marriages. The fact that Czartoryska had affairs with the most important people in the then Commonwealth did not distinguish her from her colleagues at all. The question remains why she did it. But it was her personal husband, one of the main politicians of the 18th-century Poland, who drove her in a carriage to the Royal Castle on dates with Stanisław August. In my opinion, there was much more perspicacity in it than is commonly believed. Maybe that’s why it is passed over, forgotten and underestimated.

At the same time, we proudly sigh at the memory of Maria Walewska, who was suggested to Napoleon as the most important woman in Europe at that time.

Is it not like that? Do we appreciate any information that somewhere in the world, on the occasion of some really important event, we are talking not about this event, but about all sorts of Polish people associated with it? And here, under our noses, we have a wonderful woman of her times, who not only irritated her contemporaries with her freedom and self-esteem, but also on the map of 18th-century Europe, she was one of the few women who from the ballroom, through cards sent to the greatest minds of the time, letters or from behind the curtains of the bedroom, guided the fate of the continent.

Isabella. A World in Flames – Cover Pascal publishing promotional materials