Just as a mountain river will widen out to form lakes, so the road widens out into a circular marketplace. This is where the town was born. It is an offspring of the road. There are secret laws by which a small town will be created in one place, and a village in another. The one round and wide, the other longish and slender. The market produces a hamlet, which produces a little town. It will never make a city. The careers of places are as preordained as those of men.
For it appears that in this land the conditions for development are not given. Things don’t grow. They warp and distort. In this maltreated, scorned corner of Europe, the Gothic is very much alive. There are places where everything seems unreaclass="underline" families living in summer from the sale of cucumber juice and in winter from saying prayers for the dead; haunted castles; small barefoot boys selling drinking water in the station, just water, nothing else. In Lemberg it happened that a big shire horse fell through an open drain cover. The drain covers in Lemberg are no bigger, the horses no smaller than in the rest of Europe. But God allows miracles to happen. Every Sunday He outdoes Himself.
A man in the small towns of Galicia is different from a man in the small towns of Western Europe. There he grows into pleasures, bounded by a glass of wine in the morning, and the cosy Stammtisch at night. The small town in Galicia knows no pleasures. It even turns its philistines into a phenomenon. It encourages eccentricity. The frenzy of the great cities of the world rampages through the small towns of Galicia. There is movement without discernible purpose and for no evident reason.
But the same wind keeps blowing across the flat land, though one hardly feels it. Hills, intimations of the Carpathians, ring the distance in blue. Ravens circle over the forests. They were always at home here. Since the war they have prospered. Nothing in the way of industry, advertisements, soot. In the markets people sell the sort of primitive wooden figurines that were current in Europe a couple of centuries ago. Has Europe come to an end here?
No, it hasn’t. The connection between Europe and this half-banished land is vital and unbroken. In the bookshops I saw the latest literary titles from France and England. A cultured wind carries seeds into the Polish soil. Strongest of all is the line to France. Even to Germany, more obliquely situated, occasional sparks fly back and forth.
Galicia lies in unworldly seclusion and yet is not isolated; it was banished but not severed; it has more culture than one might suppose from its deficient sewage system; plenty of disorder and still more eccentricity. Many remember it from the War, but then it hid its true nature. It wasn’t a nation. It was either hinterland or Front. But it has its own delights, its own songs, its own people, and its own allure: the sad allure of the place scorned.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 20 November 1924
22. The Polish California
Dear Friend,
I have just been to visit one of the most interesting parts of Europe, the part of Mala-Polska where the oil wells are. As you will know, it lies in Galicia, on the northern edge of the Carpathians, and its centre is the strange town of Boryslav. Oil has been produced here since the middle of the nineteenth century. The dark wooden drilling towers are positioned over an area of ten square miles or so. Compared to the towers of Baku, these seem less cruel to me, and less inimical to the earth’s surface. The earth in the Caucasus clearly suffers the curse that makes up for the blessing buried beneath. There is nothing green there, only yellow-grey desert sand and dirty brown ponds that seem not to want to dry, even though everything seems condemned to dry in the southern sun. Here in Boryslav, dubbed “the Polish Baku”, the sun is moderate, the drilling towers thin and rickety and in spite of their numbers still not the only things growing. There are still woods, which are slow to make room for the towers, seeming more to surround them fraternally than to flee from them in dread. One’s eye moves from the planked wells to the green hills, which are rendered somewhat respectable by virtue of the fact that they are part of the Carpathians. Were it not for the dust, which really is the brother of the Caucasian dust, there would only be the towers that evoke Baku.
But there is the dust, white and extremely thick. It’s as though it were not the chance outcome of rubble and dead matter, but its own element like water, fire and earth, less to do with these than with the wind, before which it spins in thick veils. It sheets the road, like flour, powder or chalk, coating every vehicle and every walker, as if it had a will or inclination of its own. It has a special relationship with the sun when it burns, as though it were fulfilling its task. And when it rains, then it turns into an ash-grey, wet, sticky mass, which forms greenish pools in every hollow.
So this is where they found oil. A few decades ago, Boryslav was no more than a village, today 30,000 people live here. A single street — four miles long — connects three places without showing any of the joins. Along the front of the houses is a wooden boardwalk mounted on short stout posts. It’s not possible to make a conventional stone pavement, because pipes run beneath the road, carrying the oil to the station. The gap in height between the boardwalk and the little houses is quite considerable; the pedestrian reaches or overtops the roofs and looks diagonally down into the rooms. The houses are all wood. Only occasionally a larger brick house comes along, whitewashed and stony, and breaks the sequence of crooked, mouldering, crumbling dwellings. All were built overnight: at a time when the stream of naphtha-seekers first began to flow here. It’s as though the boards hadn’t been hastily assembled by human hands, but the breath of human greed had blown chance materials together, and not one of these fleeting homes seems to exist for the purpose of accommodating sleeping humans, but to preserve and exacerbate the sleeplessness of excited individuals. The rancid reek of the oil, a stinking miracle, brought them here. The anomie of subterranean laws — not even predictable by geology — raised the tension of the diggers to a kind of frenzy, and the constant possibility of being a thousand feet away from billions was bound to give rise to an intoxication that was stronger than the intoxication of actual ownership. And even though they were all consigned to the unpredictability of a lottery and roulette, none of them gave in to the fatalism of waiting that was a mild prelude to disappointment. Here, at the source of petroleum, everyone believed that all it took to compel destiny was his labour; and then his zeal magnified the sorry outcome to a calamity he was no longer able to bear.
The small digger could only be freed from the intolerable cycle of hope and discouragement by the mighty hand of the greater one, and of the “societies”. They were able to buy up many claims at once, and with the relative calm that is a masculine aspect of wealth, abide the whims of the subterranean element. In amongst these mighty ones, whose patience costs them nothing and who could happily plough in millions overnight to reap billions at their leisure, the medium-sized speculators inserted themselves with their moderate credit and moderate risk-proneness and so further squeezed the little adventurer. These gradually forsook their dreams. They kept their huts. Some inscribed their names over the doors and started to deal in commodities, in soap, in shoelaces, in onions, in leather. They returned from the violent and tragic realms of the hunter of fortune to the sorry modesty of the small grocer. The huts that had been built to last a few months stayed up for years and their rickety provisionality settled into something like a local character. They suggested posed photographs in ateliers or crude book jackets for Californian adventures or just plain hallucinations. It seems to me, knowing several great industrial zones as I do, that commerce nowhere has such a fantastical aspect as here. Here capitalism lurches into expressionism.