bits and pieces. pt 2: Kosciuszko's biography (Soviet edition 🤯)
so, the next item i wanted to show the world is this lil' book (it's nearly 300 pages long), which was published in 1961 within the framework of the series «The Life of Wonderful People» («Жизнь замечательных людей», shortly «ЖЗЛ»). This series is a collection of biographies of different people that were deemed to be glorious by Soviet state and it is published to this day, (btw, there's even a biography of Mickiewicz, but that's a different story)
so yeah, this is a book published in the USSR, that's why it has certain... ideology in it, and i was aware of that when buying it. for example, the author quotes Marx and Engels on multiple occasions (which was mandatory at the time), and the Koscuiszko uprising is framed as the first attempt of Polish people to overthrow the nobility, and the last one being the liberation of Poland by the Soviet Union, which ended successfully and everyone lived their happily ever after.
so yeah, that's pretty much all the bias this book has. I don't know what to think about it tbh
(the portrait of Kos at the beninging 👍)
the key feature of the books in the series is that they are basically written like your average fiction books. authors state historical events and the turmoil of the life of the people they write about, and they do that with emotion, as you would write about your blorbos, even. in my opinion, that's not the right approach — one can only imagine what Kosciuszko felt during the Siege of Warsaw, for example, but that's only a part of one's imagination and it mustn't be considered the one and only truth, especially when one ain't attaching any source material on that matter ☝️🤓.
... so, how does the author frame Kosciuszko and his struggle for American and then Polish independence? welp... the accent here is made on the class war, rather than on struggles for a particular country's independence, as you would expect, honestly. it is true that Kos was a slavery abolishionist, but it's not his only trait as a politician, in my opinion.
the author really sympathises with Kos and his ideas, but sometimes considers him not radical enough.
honestly, reviewing his book is a bit harrrd cus it's the only point of view on Tadeusz Koscuizko I can get my hands on legally. so yeah, if there are any Polish/Lithuanian/Belarusian people reading it — what do they tell about Kosciuszko during History lessons, foe example? i'm genuinely interested.
as for the other contents of this book — there are quite a lot of illustrations of Koscuizko and people associated with him, as wall as battle schemes.
elderly Kos (Xavier Zeltner) and young Kos (Alexander Orlowski).
the battle scheme of the Siege of Warsaw.
the drawing done by Kosciuzko and the portrait of Ludwika Sosnowka (Josef Grassi)
