“Proverbs – The Opium of the People” (1928), as the triple pun of its title suggests, offers three distinct effects. First, it ridicules the Polish idiom “przysłowia - mądrość narodów,” which means “proverbs, the wisdom of the people.” Polish culture, as it is revealed to us in proverbs, is retrograde, ignorant, unrefined, parochial, and marked by obscurantism and bigotry. It displays anti-intellectual reliance on tradition and experience rather than on intellectual creativity and innovation. Słonimski invokes the term the “school of hard knocks,” the approximate American equivalent of the Polish "nieubłagana logika dziejów” which literally means “the inevitable logic of history.” From Słonimski’s perspective, the things that can be learned at the “school of hard knocks,” which can also be translated as “the university of life,” favor the past over the future. In the case of these equivalent English idioms, Słonimski surely would have said that the decidedly anti-intellectual meaning of this “school” favors “street-smarts” over knowledge gleaned from real academic institutions. Polish idioms are filled with centuries-old unreliable guns which shoot uncontrollably, God knows where, and feudal privileges that shamefully replicate themselves well into the twentieth century, markers of inequality and abusive labour practices that can hardly be seen as a source of national pride.

Second, the text subverts the Marxist vision of religion as the opium of the people, ridiculing the cult of the Polish language in independent Poland. According to the 1931 census, 11 million of the 31 million residents of the republic were not native speakers of the language. Słonimski’s caustic ridicule of idioms is also a parody on the valorization of idiomatic Polish, with its marked Catholic overtones. After all, Słonimski reminds his readers, the proverbs of those who follow Mohammed, Jehovah, Vishnu and Brahma are, fundamentally, very similar. To be sure, in light of the negligible number of Muslims, Hinduists, or Vaishnavas in interwar Poland, this is a reference to the animosity towards Jews, who constituted a third of the population of Warsaw.

Third, the article ridicules the most basic political vocabulary. Słonimski, who was deeply antagonistic to keywords such as “fatherland,” “compatriot,” or “nation,” pokes fun at terms such as “lud” - people, or “naród” - nation. If the idioms of the nation are not very bright, surely this doesn’t bode well for Polish nationalism. And if, as the Polish idiom tells us, “glos ludu jest głosem Boga” - the voice of the people is the voice of God - what does that say about the people and their God?

Further Reading:

• Harold B. Segel, Stranger in Our Midst: Images of the Jew in Polish Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996)
• Artur Sandauer, On the Situation of the Polish Writer of Jewish Descent in the Twentieth Century (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2005)
• Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006)
• Patryk Zakrzewski, “Poland’s Cultural Scene: A Snapshot from 1918,” CulturePL, 31 October 2018