Books, Arts & Manners: Dworek, Sweet Dworek

I HAD always wanted to live in a dworek. Every Pole does. An expatriate Englishman may dream of returning to a Georgian Old Rectory somewhere in the Home Counties. An Irish-American may long to go back to a mythical little white cottage. A German or a Frenchman may dream of retiring to a stone farmhouse in Bavaria or Provence. A Pole sees himself as the proud resident of a dwór, a manor house, or better still a dworek, a little manor house. A classic dworek is eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century neoclassical, and it falls halfway between an aristocrat’s palace and a prosperous peasant’s house, with an obligatory white porch, pillars, and at least a hint of a park. It need not be grand; in England an average dworek would qualify as little more than a spacious cottage. Thousands used to dot the length and breadth of Poland.

A dworek is not just a nice house to live in, but a calling. Nations that have not lived under occupation perhaps cannot imagine the aura surrounding the places where national aspirations were once preserved. In the nineteenth century, when Poland was wiped off the map of Europe, Polishness was preserved in two places: in church by the peasants, and in the dwór by the nobility. It was from their manor houses that Polish nobles set off on their hopeless nineteenth-century insurrections, and it was the manor houses that the tsarist authorities confiscated as punishment after each failure. Until a couple of generations ago, Polish romantic novels-the best reflection of popular imagination—always centered on a dworek.

RS

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Radek Sikorski

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I HAD always wanted to live in a dworek. Every Pole does. An expatriate Englishman may dream of returning to a Georgian Old Rectory somewhere in the Home Counties. An Irish-American may long to go back to a mythical little white cottage. A German or a Frenchman may dream of retiring to a stone farmhouse in Bavaria or Provence. A Pole sees himself as the proud resident of a dwór, a manor house, or better still a dworek, a little manor house. A classic dworek is eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century neoclassical, and it falls halfway between an aristocrat’s palace and a prosperous peasant’s house, with an obligatory white porch, pillars, and at least a hint of a park. It need not be grand; in England an average dworek would qualify as little more than a spacious cottage. Thousands used to dot the length and breadth of Poland.

A dworek is not just a nice house to live in, but a calling. Nations that have not lived under occupation perhaps cannot imagine the aura surrounding the places where national aspirations were once preserved. In the nineteenth century, when Poland was wiped off the map of Europe, Polishness was preserved in two places: in church by the peasants, and in the dwór by the nobility. It was from their manor houses that Polish nobles set off on their hopeless nineteenth-century insurrections, and it was the manor houses that the tsarist authorities confiscated as punishment after each failure. Until a couple of generations ago, Polish romantic novels-the best reflection of popular imagination—always centered on a dworek.