Poland Is Not Yet Lost

• 1. Introduction

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  "Poland Is Not Yet Lost" began not in Poland, but in a city in northern Italy, written in a matter of days between the 16th and the 19th of July 1797. Józef Wybicki composed the poem in Reggio Emilia while the Polish Legions were quartered there, serving under Napoleon Bonaparte far from the homeland that had, just two years earlier, ceased to exist on any map. The Third Partition of 1795 had erased the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the monarchs of Russia, Prussia, and Austria pledged never even to use the word "Poland" in their official titles again. Hugo Kołłątaj, one of the leading minds of the Polish Enlightenment, declared that Poland "no longer belonged to currently extant nations." Yet within those four days in Reggio, Wybicki set down lyrics insisting otherwise. How a poem written for a regiment of exiles came to voice something permanent about nationhood, how it crossed borders and inspired anthems from Kyiv to Zagreb, and why it endured through a century of occupation: that is what this documentary examines.

• 2. A Nation Without a State

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  Jan Henryk Dąbrowski arrived in Paris after the Third Partition with a specific idea. Having led the Greater Poland campaign during the 1794 Kościuszko Uprising, he came to the French Directory to propose forming Polish military units within the French Revolutionary Army. France was already at war with Austria, a member of the partitioning powers, which made the alliance logical. The Directory sent Dąbrowski to Napoleon, who was then campaigning in northern Italy. In January 1797, the newly created Cisalpine Republic accepted the offer, and a Polish legion took shape. These soldiers planned to fight Austria under Napoleon and then march "from Italy to Poland" to ignite a national uprising at home.

  When Wybicki arrived in Reggio Emilia in early July 1797, he found soldiers who were largely Galician peasants. Many had been drafted into the Austrian army and captured as prisoners of war by the French. He first performed the new song at a private gathering of Polish officers in the Legions' headquarters at the episcopal palace in Reggio. The first public performance most likely took place on the 16th of July 1797, during a military parade in Reggio's Piazza del Duomo. On the 20th of July, it was played again as the Legions marched out toward Milan, the Cisalpine capital.

  By the 29th of August 1797, Dąbrowski was writing to Wybicki from Bologna that "soldiers gain more and more taste for your song." The poem worked on two audiences at once. Officers, typically émigré noblemen, responded to its appeal to patriotic duty. Common soldiers, the peasant conscripts, found their own cause in the final stanza, which invoked Kościuszko and the "scythes of Racławice" -- a battle whose outcome owed much to peasants armed with farming tools repurposed as weapons.

• 3. The Poem and Its Heroes

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  The lyrics Wybicki wrote are a poem of six quatrains and a refrain, following an ABAB rhyme scheme. Each stanza names a specific hero or invokes a specific image, and the choice of which figures to include was deliberate. Adam Mickiewicz, the author of the Polish national epic Pan Tadeusz, explained the anthem's central idea to students of Slavic Literature in Paris in 1842: "Poland has not perished yet as long as we live. These words mean that people who have in them what constitutes the essence of a nation can prolong the existence of their country regardless of its political circumstances and may even strive to make it real again."

  Napoleon Bonaparte is the only non-Polish person named in the anthem. At the time the song was written, he was Dąbrowski's superior, commanding the Italian campaign of the French Revolutionary Wars. The lyrics describe him as the one "who has shown us ways to victory."

  Stefan Czarniecki, a 17th-century military commander, appears because of his role in driving the Swedish Army from Poland during the period Poles call the Deluge. When a Dano-Swedish War broke out, Czarniecki continued fighting Sweden in Denmark, then crossed back "through the sea" to rejoin the Polish king at the Royal Castle in Poznań. It is worth noting that Wybicki himself began his legal career at that same castle in 1765.

  Tadeusz Kościuszko is mentioned in a stanza that no longer appears in the official anthem. He had become a hero of the American Revolutionary War before returning to Poland to fight Russia in 1792 and leading the national uprising of 1794. Wybicki may have hoped Kościuszko would come to Italy to personally lead the Legions -- a hope that was already outdated, since Kościuszko had returned to Philadelphia by the time the song was written. The fictional characters Basia and her weeping father represent Polish women and elderly men waiting for the soldiers to bring them home, and the rivers Vistula and Warta named in the lyrics trace the route the Legions hoped to march through Austrian- and Prussian-held Polish territory.

• 4. The Melody and Its Composers

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  The music of the anthem is a mazurka, a musical form derived from traditional folk dances of Mazuria, a historical region in northeast Poland. A mazurka is defined by a triple meter and irregular strong accents on the second or third beat. The form reached Western European ballrooms in the 19th century largely through the mazurkas of Frédéric Chopin.

  The original composer of "Mazurek Dąbrowskiego" is unknown. The melody is most likely Wybicki's own adaptation of a folk tune that had already been circulating in the second half of the 18th century. For years the piece was incorrectly credited to Michał Kleofas Ogiński, who was known to have composed a march for Dąbrowski's legions. Historians conflated Ogiński's "Marche pour les Légions polonaises" with Wybicki's mazurka, possibly because the anthem's own chorus opens with the words "March, march, Dąbrowski." The confusion was only resolved in 1938, when Ogiński's sheet music was discovered and confirmed to be a separate composition.

  Karol Lipiński was the first to work the anthem into a composed piece, using it in an overture for his opera Kłótnia przez zakład, staged in Lviv around 1812. Karol Kurpiński followed with a Fugue on "Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła" for piano and organ, published in Warsaw in 1821. Richard Wagner and Albert Lortzing, moved by the November Uprising, wove the mazurka into their own works. In 1908, Ignacy Jan Paderewski -- later the first Prime Minister of independent Poland -- quoted the anthem in his Symphony in B minor "Polonia", scoring the melody in duple meter rather than the standard triple. Edward Elgar quoted it again in his symphonic prelude Polonia, composed in 1915. The current official score is an arrangement by Kazimierz Sikorski, published by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, designed to accommodate a cappella and instrumental versions with interchangeable parts.

• 5. A Century of Occupation

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  The fate of the Polish Legions in Italy bore no resemblance to the homecoming Wybicki's lyrics had promised. Rather than marching back to Poland, they were sent by the French government to suppress uprisings in Italy, Germany, and eventually Haiti, where they were decimated by war and disease. The anthem itself, however, kept moving. By late 1797 it had reached Poland, and a 1798 variant introduced changes that became standard: nie umarła ('not dead') became nie zginęła ('not perished'), and the chorus word order shifted to put Italy before Poland in the first line.

  When Napoleon's army approached Polish-held Prussian territory in 1806, Dąbrowski and Wybicki returned from Italy. On the 6th of November 1806, both arrived in Poznań to crowds singing the anthem in the streets. The resulting Greater Poland Uprising, combined with Napoleon's victory at Friedland, produced the Duchy of Warsaw. The song was performed at the battle of Friedland celebrations in Warsaw on the 16th of June 1807, at the liberation of Kraków by Prince Józef Poniatowski on the 19th of July 1809, and at a ball in Warsaw on the 23rd of December 1809 marking the birthday of Frederick Augustus. On Dąbrowski's name day, the 25th of December 1810, he and Wybicki together led a mazurka to the anthem's tune in Poznań.

  Diplomacy altered the lyrics. The 1807 Franco-Russian alliance at Tilsit led to the removal of the stanza naming Russians as enemies. The Kościuszko stanza followed when Kościuszko refused to support Napoleon's war in Poland.

  After Napoleon's defeat and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, a century of foreign rule over Poland began. The anthem was chanted at the battles of Stoczek, Olszynka Grochowska, and Iganie during the November Uprising of 1830-1831. Between 1873 and 1911, German courts handed down 44 sentences for singing Polish patriotic songs, 20 of them specifically for "Poland Is Not Yet Lost." Patriotic songs had been banned in Prussia since 1850. In Russian-controlled Poland, public performance routinely ended with police intervention. The November Uprising alone generated at least 16 alternative versions of the anthem. A version called "Marsz Polonii" spread among Polish immigrants in the Americas. At various moments, Dąbrowski's name in the chorus was substituted with that of Józef Chłopicki, then Józef Piłsudski, then Władysław Sikorski.

• 6. Official Anthem at Last

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  When Poland declared independence as the Second Polish Republic in 1918, it had to choose national symbols from a crowded field. The coat of arms and flag were settled by 1919. The anthem question took longer, partly because several other songs carried comparable weight. Medieval hymns such as "Bogurodzica" and the Latin "Gaude Mater Polonia" had served anthem-like functions for centuries. "Rota", composed by Maria Konopnicka with music by Feliks Nowowiejski in 1908 and first performed publicly in 1910 at a quincentennial celebration of the victory over the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald, was another serious contender. "Warszawianka", originally written in French by Casimir Delavigne with music by Karol Kurpiński, had been closely associated with the November Uprising. Despite all of this competition, "Poland Is Not Yet Lost" became the de facto anthem in 1918 and was officially adopted in 1927.

  Wybicki's original manuscript did not survive the deliberations. It remained in the possession of his descendants until February 1944, when it was lost in the home of his great-great-grandson, Johann von Roznowski, in Charlottenburg during Allied bombing of Berlin. The manuscript is now known only through twenty-four facsimile copies made in 1886 by Wybicki's grandson, Edward Rożnowski, who donated them to Polish libraries.

• 7. Rubinstein at San Francisco

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  At the inauguration of the United Nations in 1945, Poland had no delegation. The pianist Artur Rubinstein, who had been invited to perform the opening concert, addressed the audience before playing. He stated his deep disappointment that no Polish representative had been invited to the conference. Then, in what he later described as a blind fury, he pointed out the absence of the Polish flag. He sat down and played "Poland Is Not Yet Lost" loudly and slowly, repeating the final section in a thunderous forte. The audience rose and gave him a standing ovation.

  More than sixty years later, on the 22nd of September 2005, President Aleksander Kwaśniewski stood in the same San Francisco opera house when the orchestra performed the Dąbrowski Mazurka at the season opening. He said that the memory of Rubinstein's performance came back "with full force" and described the moment as very touching. His speech that day revisited the political grievance directly: he noted that Poland had made a major contribution to the Allied victory in World War II, yet in June 1945 no Polish representative was permitted to sign the United Nations Charter.

• 8. Echoes Across Borders

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  During the European Revolutions of 1848, the anthem traveled across the continent as a revolutionary symbol. The Slovak poet Samo Tomášik wrote "Hej, Sloveni" to a slowed version of the Polish melody; the Prague Slavic Congress adopted it as a Pan-Slavic anthem. During World War II a translation became the national anthem of Yugoslavia, then of Serbia and Montenegro. The similar melodies occasionally confused referees and crowds at football or volleyball matches between those countries. After the 2006 separation of Serbia and Montenegro, neither retained the anthem: Serbia adopted "Bože pravde" and Montenegro chose "Oj, svijetla majska zoro."

  The Polish anthem directly influenced the Ukrainian national anthem "Ukraine Is Not Yet Perished", the Israeli anthem "Hatikvah" (whose title translates as "Our hope is not yet lost"), the Croatian reveille "Croatia has not yet fallen", and the Slovak and Yugoslav anthem "Hey, Slavs." The Italian anthem "Il Canto degli Italiani" contains a reference to the Partitions of Poland, reflecting the close relations between the two countries during the Napoleonic era.

  The anthem's opening line has passed into everyday language in at least two other countries. In German, noch ist Polen nicht verloren is a common phrase meaning "all is not lost." In Swedish, the equivalent är inte Polen förlorat carries the same meaning. The anthem is played every day at midnight on the First Programme of Polish Radio, a routine that started with a composition dating from 1797 and has continued without interruption.