Russians considered Frederic Chopin music to be "Polish guns hidden in flowers" (one of the Russian officials citation) so they had to ban it (on the Polish territory occupied by Russia, in Russia itself it was legal to play Chopin...).
That quote is from Robert Schumann, a German composer contemporary with Chopin. It was not a citation from any Russian officials, nor was Chopin banned in Poland by the Russians (it was banned during the German occupation for a while).
It's disappointing that neither Monika Ścisłowska with Rafał Niedzielski of apnews.com, nor Aleksandra Bogucka of culture.pl - all of them Polish people - bothered at least once to mention how this national dance is called in its mother tongue. So, here it is: polonez.
`polonez` is a deformation from the actual name `polonaise` (cf https://www.reddit.com/r/BoneAppleTea/), it makes sense that they don't mention it since it's obviously not Polish of origin (why would Polish people call it Polish dance ?)
They do mention the original Polish dance chodzony, extensively
And yet, this is exactly how it's been called in Poland for years. [1] Unsurprisingly, you can find "polonez" on gov.pl too. [2]
"a deformation from the actual name" in this context is called a loanword.
Regardless of etymology, an article talking about a national treasure being put on UNESCO list absolutely should mention that, IMO. Can be next to "chodzony". No problem with that. Even better, TBH.
AP didn't write even "chodzony", btw. Only "the «walking dance»".
The polonaise is a dance for those curious about classical forms. J.S. Bach included this elegant, fast-paced, stylized dance in several of his suites. Though rooted in folk traditions, the polonaise evolved into a refined court dance. For those interested, composer Sara Schumann also wrote an entire suite of polonaises, though she remains relatively unknown.
To any music experts here—especially pianists—why are these called "stylized" dances? I understand they’re based on folk dance forms, but I often struggle to connect the music to the original dances. Some, like the slow and distinct sarabande, are easier to recognize. But how do you tell the difference between something like a minuet and a polonaise?
Thanks for the share. I used to be part of a Polish folk dancing ensemble here in Australia and we would perform this dance. As a teen I have to admit I was sometimes embarrassed to dress up and perform since in Australia people didn’t really know the traditions or history.
Recently, though, I took my daughter to a class for the exact same group who is still performing and has a much larger cohort of young proud Polish Australians - am really impressed another generation is embracing their heritage this way.
Terrible fact-checking and I doubt the good faith by Associate Press.
The authors (Monika Ścisłowska and Rafał Niedzielski) claim that Polonaise was banned in USSR, which is false. Neither it was ever banned in Russian Empire.
The culture.pl article mentions that
> dancing the polonaise was temporarily banned in the Congress Kingdom
Which could be the case, I don't know, but I couldn't google other sources in 10 minutes either.
> Terrible fact-checking and I doubt the good faith by Associate Press. The authors (Monika Ścisłowska and Rafał Niedzielski) claim that Polonaise was banned in USSR, which is false. Neither it was ever banned in Russian Empire.
>
> The culture.pl article mentions that > dancing the polonaise was temporarily banned in the Congress Kingdom
I'm not sure that qualifies for terrible fact checking, or in any case, none of this refutes any of it. Since the AP doesn't cite its sources, their claim could certainly be wrong, but neither of the facts you cite contradict its claims.
First, the AP piece doesn't say it was banned in the USSR, it says Poland’s post-World War II communist authorities banned it from schools, which ~~is actually supported~~ isn't refuted by culture.pl, too:
> [After 1933], the tradition of dancing the polonaise together by the students of the graduating classes returned to schools, but it disappeared again after 1948 for the duration of Stalinism.
I know culture.pl doesn't explicitly say "banned" but both the idiomatic translation and the parallel experience in virtually every country under Soviet occupation would indicate that. culture.pl unfortunately (and unforgivably) doesn't cite sources, so I can't follow the trail, and dance history is definitely not my field. But a social dance with notorious ethnic rules not being banned in that space would've been the exception, not the rule.
(Edit: If it happened, it wouldn't have had to happen by direct government dispatch, either, this would have typically been done on the "advice" of party activists at lower levels (e.g. in each school), operating under broader directives to discourage nationalist expression, not some specific dance. Each country has thousands of traditions, some of them with local names, you can't issue a document to ban each of them at central level).
Second: it not being banned in the Russian Empire has no bearing on AP's claim about it being banned in the "territories that Russia took over"
The Congress Kingdom was under Russian rule, first de facto, and then entirely de jure. It had nominal (but generally disregarded, hence "de facto" rule) autonomy until shortly after the November uprising in 1831. Then, through the Organic Statute of the Kingdom of Poland, the Kingdom's constitution, army and parliament were abolished, thus effectively making it an imperial subject, under direct rule after 1837, with a weird customs border (and, starting from 1867 IIRC, not even that).
These are "the territories that Russia took over" in the AP piece. The only way for the polonaise to be temporarily banned -- if it was actually banned, again, culture.pl doesn't cite its sources -- in the Congress Kingdom was by dispatch from St. Petersburg, unless somehow the Polish banned their own dances.
Up until 1867 (at which point the kingdom, already an administrative fiction for more than 50 years, was finally formally abolished) that could be done without it being banned in the Russian Empire proper, too. Afterwards, what was previously the Congress Kingdom retained governorate status, so the polonaise could be banned on its territory without being banned through the rest of the Empire, too.
Sure thing! News agencies could really do a better job when reporting on historical issues. This is no exception. What they're saying is plausible but it's not the sort of thing you'd expect a news outlet to casually throw around without sources. "Plausible, but unproven" shouldn't be the reporting standard. That's how false reporting gets in. For all I know (as I mentioned above, dance, and art history in general, is hardly my thing) this could be one such case, too.
Folk dances were a part of school curriculum in the first half of the XXth century, and part of the maturity exam was ceremonial dancing of polonez. In 1948 the whole education system was changed to be in line with USSR programs, and folk dances, including the polonez ceremony, were removed as class "unjust". This was not a hard ban, and the tradition slowly, unofficially at first, came back a couple decades later anyway.
FWIW the Imperial Russia didn't like the Chopin polonez (the music) either and considered it "a cannon hidden in a bocquet", forbidding its performance in their part of the occupied/partitioned territory (ironically it was perfectly fine to play it in Russia itself).
There is a large distance between “removed from curriculum” and “banned”. I suspect that it’s not in the current school graduation requirements either.
The “cannon hidden in the flowers” quote comes from Schumann, who wasn’t Russian. Chopin, of course, sympathized with the November uprising and renounced his Russian citizenship, so Tsarist Russia was not happy about that. That does not tell you anything about the polonaise itself, though.
> There is a large distance between “removed from curriculum” and “banned”. I suspect that it’s not in the current school graduation requirements either.
Not necessarily, early on things got dropped from the curricula all the time because the GUKPiW had banned them, either specifically or by topic.
Blanket bans on general topics or activities make it extremely difficult to discuss censorship post-factum. For example, Juliusz Slowacki wasn't banned, but while some of his works could be freely published in some media they were fully or partially banned in other media (notoriously, Television Theatre got in trouble over parts from Kordian). Lots of cultural activities or works weren't banned directly, or not in all forms.
Yes, “large distance” implies that many in-between options exist. Folk dances, however, were a whole thing with Stalinists (“culture that is national in form, and socialist in content”), so an outright ban would seem out of character.
I would probably remove folk dances from school graduation requirements too, if I somehow fumbled into a position where I take those kinds of decisions.
> Folk dances, however, were a whole thing with Stalinists (“culture that is national in form, and socialist in content”), so an outright ban would seem out of character.
Folk dances and culture in general were a whole thing with Stalinists, but authorities exerted a considerable degree of influence and a ban on some specific folk dances (or cultural manifestations), or on some specific aspects of them, wouldn't have been out of character at all.
Where I'm from, a whole range of folk dances, songs and theatre were banned not by name but under either a ban of the religious denominations that prominently practiced them or a blanket ban on public celebration of major Christian holidays, especially Christmas and Easter.
Folks dances, too, are kind of murky in this area. Perhaps one of the most widely-displayed folk dances of the Eastern Bloc in the communist era, a Romanian dance called "Căluș", retained some of its essential choreography, but was otherwise radically changed to drop its religious undertone, to the point where it was pretty much a different thing by the end of the sixties. Some of it was "recovered" in the eighties, when a peculiar for of protochronism began to permeate some official circles so doing the ancestors thing was cool again, but during the high Stalinist period the "old form" fell under a general repression of what was officially termed "religious mysticism". This led to an entirely peculiar situation where the dance was technically okay, kids learned something resembling it in school and danced it during official ceremonies at the city hall, but grown-ass adults who'd learned it from their parents (edit: not literally from their parents, the way it was taught was a whole thing and didn't help with the whole mysticism issue but anyway) and practised it outside official cultural institutions got rounded up.
Surface google searches do not return anything meaningful. It would be also weird to call one of the domestic car lines after something that is supposedly banned.
It's interesting, I asked ChatGPT about this and it said it was not banned, then I turned on "search the web" and it says it was - citing AP News and VoA, basically this very article. I wonder if there's any more info.
Edit: funnily enough DeepSeek gives an answer that sounds plausible: apparently during the Stalinist period of 40s-50s while it supposedly wasn't outright banned "overt displays of national pride were often discouraged" ... That seems to fit, and a bit of judgement over whether something is banned explicitly or simply so unthinkable in the official climate that it may as well be banned.
As a half Polish half Russian who grew up in soviet Lithuania i still remember hating to learn polonez in the late soviet period. Dancing doesn't involve computers...
Anyways, as a single statistically insignificant fact: polonez was not banned in late ussr.
And a glamorous version of polonez was also taught in higher imperial circles. At some point everything polish was quite trendy. Probably not around the big 19th century uprising though.
The full story of the dance and the music in the empire is quite a bit more complicated than just "banned" or "not banned". Many polonezes were written by Polish aristocrates integrated into imperial elites and were very popular.
One example is Oginsky's polonez. Oginsky was one of the uprising avtive participants. And also an imperial senator.
There's also Kozlovsky (orthodox Polish from belarus or something) whose polonez was an unofficial imperial hymn at some point.
So go figure. History is never as simple as narrative builds try to put it.
Polonez certainly wasn't banned under PRL or USSR, but it would not surprise me if Chopin arrangements of Polonez were banned in "Congress Poland" but allowed in "proper Russia"
Wasn't banned by Imperial Russia either. There was a very short period of time (1799-1828) when all kind of waltzes were banned, but the ban was never enforced and it had nothing to do specifically with polonez or Poland.
Russians considered Frederic Chopin music to be "Polish guns hidden in flowers" (one of the Russian officials citation) so they had to ban it (on the Polish territory occupied by Russia, in Russia itself it was legal to play Chopin...).
That quote is from Robert Schumann, a German composer contemporary with Chopin. It was not a citation from any Russian officials, nor was Chopin banned in Poland by the Russians (it was banned during the German occupation for a while).
More about the Polonaise[0].
[0] https://culture.pl/en/work/dancing-through-history-the-polon...
Also https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Polonez ;)
It's disappointing that neither Monika Ścisłowska with Rafał Niedzielski of apnews.com, nor Aleksandra Bogucka of culture.pl - all of them Polish people - bothered at least once to mention how this national dance is called in its mother tongue. So, here it is: polonez.
`polonez` is a deformation from the actual name `polonaise` (cf https://www.reddit.com/r/BoneAppleTea/), it makes sense that they don't mention it since it's obviously not Polish of origin (why would Polish people call it Polish dance ?)
They do mention the original Polish dance chodzony, extensively
Currently it's mostly referred to as "polonez", with that exact spelling. It's one of those loan words that got it's spelling changed in Polish.
And yet, this is exactly how it's been called in Poland for years. [1] Unsurprisingly, you can find "polonez" on gov.pl too. [2]
"a deformation from the actual name" in this context is called a loanword.
Regardless of etymology, an article talking about a national treasure being put on UNESCO list absolutely should mention that, IMO. Can be next to "chodzony". No problem with that. Even better, TBH.
AP didn't write even "chodzony", btw. Only "the «walking dance»".
Oh wow, like 3 letters difference, pronounced identically in English, glad you cleared that up.
That's not the point, but whatever.
The polonaise is a dance for those curious about classical forms. J.S. Bach included this elegant, fast-paced, stylized dance in several of his suites. Though rooted in folk traditions, the polonaise evolved into a refined court dance. For those interested, composer Sara Schumann also wrote an entire suite of polonaises, though she remains relatively unknown.
To any music experts here—especially pianists—why are these called "stylized" dances? I understand they’re based on folk dance forms, but I often struggle to connect the music to the original dances. Some, like the slow and distinct sarabande, are easier to recognize. But how do you tell the difference between something like a minuet and a polonaise?
Thanks for the share. I used to be part of a Polish folk dancing ensemble here in Australia and we would perform this dance. As a teen I have to admit I was sometimes embarrassed to dress up and perform since in Australia people didn’t really know the traditions or history.
Recently, though, I took my daughter to a class for the exact same group who is still performing and has a much larger cohort of young proud Polish Australians - am really impressed another generation is embracing their heritage this way.
Terrible fact-checking and I doubt the good faith by Associate Press. The authors (Monika Ścisłowska and Rafał Niedzielski) claim that Polonaise was banned in USSR, which is false. Neither it was ever banned in Russian Empire.
The culture.pl article mentions that > dancing the polonaise was temporarily banned in the Congress Kingdom
Which could be the case, I don't know, but I couldn't google other sources in 10 minutes either.
That's the trouble with mainstream media, everybody's got an agenda when it comes to the topic of polonaise dance.
> Terrible fact-checking and I doubt the good faith by Associate Press. The authors (Monika Ścisłowska and Rafał Niedzielski) claim that Polonaise was banned in USSR, which is false. Neither it was ever banned in Russian Empire. > > The culture.pl article mentions that > dancing the polonaise was temporarily banned in the Congress Kingdom
I'm not sure that qualifies for terrible fact checking, or in any case, none of this refutes any of it. Since the AP doesn't cite its sources, their claim could certainly be wrong, but neither of the facts you cite contradict its claims.
First, the AP piece doesn't say it was banned in the USSR, it says Poland’s post-World War II communist authorities banned it from schools, which ~~is actually supported~~ isn't refuted by culture.pl, too:
> [After 1933], the tradition of dancing the polonaise together by the students of the graduating classes returned to schools, but it disappeared again after 1948 for the duration of Stalinism.
I know culture.pl doesn't explicitly say "banned" but both the idiomatic translation and the parallel experience in virtually every country under Soviet occupation would indicate that. culture.pl unfortunately (and unforgivably) doesn't cite sources, so I can't follow the trail, and dance history is definitely not my field. But a social dance with notorious ethnic rules not being banned in that space would've been the exception, not the rule.
(Edit: If it happened, it wouldn't have had to happen by direct government dispatch, either, this would have typically been done on the "advice" of party activists at lower levels (e.g. in each school), operating under broader directives to discourage nationalist expression, not some specific dance. Each country has thousands of traditions, some of them with local names, you can't issue a document to ban each of them at central level).
Second: it not being banned in the Russian Empire has no bearing on AP's claim about it being banned in the "territories that Russia took over"
The Congress Kingdom was under Russian rule, first de facto, and then entirely de jure. It had nominal (but generally disregarded, hence "de facto" rule) autonomy until shortly after the November uprising in 1831. Then, through the Organic Statute of the Kingdom of Poland, the Kingdom's constitution, army and parliament were abolished, thus effectively making it an imperial subject, under direct rule after 1837, with a weird customs border (and, starting from 1867 IIRC, not even that).
These are "the territories that Russia took over" in the AP piece. The only way for the polonaise to be temporarily banned -- if it was actually banned, again, culture.pl doesn't cite its sources -- in the Congress Kingdom was by dispatch from St. Petersburg, unless somehow the Polish banned their own dances.
Up until 1867 (at which point the kingdom, already an administrative fiction for more than 50 years, was finally formally abolished) that could be done without it being banned in the Russian Empire proper, too. Afterwards, what was previously the Congress Kingdom retained governorate status, so the polonaise could be banned on its territory without being banned through the rest of the Empire, too.
Thank you for your corrections
Sure thing! News agencies could really do a better job when reporting on historical issues. This is no exception. What they're saying is plausible but it's not the sort of thing you'd expect a news outlet to casually throw around without sources. "Plausible, but unproven" shouldn't be the reporting standard. That's how false reporting gets in. For all I know (as I mentioned above, dance, and art history in general, is hardly my thing) this could be one such case, too.
Here's polonaise record from 1952 published in USSR https://youtu.be/UCjuwnWJf88
Can someone give a source for communists banning polonaise? It sounds implausible, and googling did not produce a satisfying result.
The sources come from Polish language books.
Folk dances were a part of school curriculum in the first half of the XXth century, and part of the maturity exam was ceremonial dancing of polonez. In 1948 the whole education system was changed to be in line with USSR programs, and folk dances, including the polonez ceremony, were removed as class "unjust". This was not a hard ban, and the tradition slowly, unofficially at first, came back a couple decades later anyway.
FWIW the Imperial Russia didn't like the Chopin polonez (the music) either and considered it "a cannon hidden in a bocquet", forbidding its performance in their part of the occupied/partitioned territory (ironically it was perfectly fine to play it in Russia itself).
There is a large distance between “removed from curriculum” and “banned”. I suspect that it’s not in the current school graduation requirements either.
The “cannon hidden in the flowers” quote comes from Schumann, who wasn’t Russian. Chopin, of course, sympathized with the November uprising and renounced his Russian citizenship, so Tsarist Russia was not happy about that. That does not tell you anything about the polonaise itself, though.
> There is a large distance between “removed from curriculum” and “banned”. I suspect that it’s not in the current school graduation requirements either.
Not necessarily, early on things got dropped from the curricula all the time because the GUKPiW had banned them, either specifically or by topic.
Blanket bans on general topics or activities make it extremely difficult to discuss censorship post-factum. For example, Juliusz Slowacki wasn't banned, but while some of his works could be freely published in some media they were fully or partially banned in other media (notoriously, Television Theatre got in trouble over parts from Kordian). Lots of cultural activities or works weren't banned directly, or not in all forms.
Yes, “large distance” implies that many in-between options exist. Folk dances, however, were a whole thing with Stalinists (“culture that is national in form, and socialist in content”), so an outright ban would seem out of character.
I would probably remove folk dances from school graduation requirements too, if I somehow fumbled into a position where I take those kinds of decisions.
> Folk dances, however, were a whole thing with Stalinists (“culture that is national in form, and socialist in content”), so an outright ban would seem out of character.
Folk dances and culture in general were a whole thing with Stalinists, but authorities exerted a considerable degree of influence and a ban on some specific folk dances (or cultural manifestations), or on some specific aspects of them, wouldn't have been out of character at all.
Where I'm from, a whole range of folk dances, songs and theatre were banned not by name but under either a ban of the religious denominations that prominently practiced them or a blanket ban on public celebration of major Christian holidays, especially Christmas and Easter.
Folks dances, too, are kind of murky in this area. Perhaps one of the most widely-displayed folk dances of the Eastern Bloc in the communist era, a Romanian dance called "Căluș", retained some of its essential choreography, but was otherwise radically changed to drop its religious undertone, to the point where it was pretty much a different thing by the end of the sixties. Some of it was "recovered" in the eighties, when a peculiar for of protochronism began to permeate some official circles so doing the ancestors thing was cool again, but during the high Stalinist period the "old form" fell under a general repression of what was officially termed "religious mysticism". This led to an entirely peculiar situation where the dance was technically okay, kids learned something resembling it in school and danced it during official ceremonies at the city hall, but grown-ass adults who'd learned it from their parents (edit: not literally from their parents, the way it was taught was a whole thing and didn't help with the whole mysticism issue but anyway) and practised it outside official cultural institutions got rounded up.
Surface google searches do not return anything meaningful. It would be also weird to call one of the domestic car lines after something that is supposedly banned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Polonez
It's interesting, I asked ChatGPT about this and it said it was not banned, then I turned on "search the web" and it says it was - citing AP News and VoA, basically this very article. I wonder if there's any more info.
Edit: funnily enough DeepSeek gives an answer that sounds plausible: apparently during the Stalinist period of 40s-50s while it supposedly wasn't outright banned "overt displays of national pride were often discouraged" ... That seems to fit, and a bit of judgement over whether something is banned explicitly or simply so unthinkable in the official climate that it may as well be banned.
>It's interesting, I asked ChatGPT about this and it said it was not banned,
Asking ChatGPT is useless for finding a definitive answer for anything, and all the more so when the facts are in question.
it feels like soon anything that chatgpt doesn't know will be deemed "misinformation"
any experts in any field can easily find tons of stuff LLMs don’t know.
hell they don’t even know how to measure or calculate wallpaper correctly.
Nobody can. Wallpaper calculations are in the realm of eldritch mathematics.
You always end up with a gap, and despite that several rolls left over! Which you will then keep for years "just in case".
Imperial Russia, not communists
AFAIR .. it wasn't even banned during the Imperial Russian times; rather it was just considered a "Russian" dance.
Never heard of the Polonez being banned during PRL times... We sure danced it out in the fields then (though this was later times).
As a half Polish half Russian who grew up in soviet Lithuania i still remember hating to learn polonez in the late soviet period. Dancing doesn't involve computers...
Anyways, as a single statistically insignificant fact: polonez was not banned in late ussr.
And a glamorous version of polonez was also taught in higher imperial circles. At some point everything polish was quite trendy. Probably not around the big 19th century uprising though.
The full story of the dance and the music in the empire is quite a bit more complicated than just "banned" or "not banned". Many polonezes were written by Polish aristocrates integrated into imperial elites and were very popular.
One example is Oginsky's polonez. Oginsky was one of the uprising avtive participants. And also an imperial senator.
There's also Kozlovsky (orthodox Polish from belarus or something) whose polonez was an unofficial imperial hymn at some point.
So go figure. History is never as simple as narrative builds try to put it.
Polonez certainly wasn't banned under PRL or USSR, but it would not surprise me if Chopin arrangements of Polonez were banned in "Congress Poland" but allowed in "proper Russia"
Wasn't banned by Imperial Russia either. There was a very short period of time (1799-1828) when all kind of waltzes were banned, but the ban was never enforced and it had nothing to do specifically with polonez or Poland.
I wouldn't describe 29 years as "a very short period of time".
Clearly not a geologist...
And the de facto Russian national anthem at the time was a polonaise.
The article’s title is “Once banned by communists, Poland’s stately 18th century dance garners UNESCO honors”.
Imperial Russia also never banned the polonaise, obviously.