The story of the other Piłsudski

According to Piłsudski’s biographer, Andrzej Garlicki, in Zułow the Piłsudski family led an affluent life. They had a large mansion with a number of servants and everything would have been perfect if not for the fact that Józef Senior’s heart was not in managing the estate. He had many ideas but few successes and he failed to implement most of his plans. He would initiate the construction of outhouses which would then stand for years unfinished. He would invest in the production of yeast or alcohol distilleries, mills and animal breeding businesses, but all the undertakings would have little economic success.

The fire

Józef Senior would purchase numerous agricultural machines which usually fell into ruin due to lack of use. The last straw of this poorly managed estate was a fire which destroyed the entire mansion. By that time there was no money for renovation and the family had to move to Vilnius. There, Bronisław attended middle school and together with his brother Józef and other peers organised a study group. By the time Bronisław reached 18, his mother had passed away. He continued to work and later moved to St Petersburg where he began studying law. During his first year of study, he became involved in political underground movements that were popular among the Petersburg and Vilnius youth. It was a time when young revolutionaries dreamed about overthrowing the tsar and gaining more democratic freedoms. As a result, the Petersburg students requested the support of the Vilnius students in order to access poison, weapons and explosives to assassinate Tsar Alexander III.

Alexander Ulyanov, Vladimir Lenin’s older brother, was deeply involved in the affair. Mikhail Kancher, another student from St Petersburg, went to Vilnius and spent a night at the Piłsudski family apartment in the absence of Bronisław. There he met Józef Junior, who was 19 at the time. The poison strychnine was procured along with some local donations for the cause. On March 1st 1887 in St Petersburg, the students carried out a failed assassination attempt on the tsar. A large group of students, carrying a hand-made bomb, were detained on Nevsky Prospect (St Petersburg’s main avenue). The investigation ended with the imprisonment of 70 students at the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress, including both Piłsudski brothers. While it was impossible to prove their direct involvement in the assassination attempt, a search of Bronisław’s Vilnius flat found handwritten manuscripts on the revolution.

Those who were directly involved in the plot – including Lenin’s brother – received more severe sentences. The tsar himself authorised the execution of five people. Bronisław was also given the death penalty but it was later reduced to 15 years of servitude, most likely due to a lack of evidence and his father’s efforts to mitigate the sentence. In the course of the investigation, Bronisław accepted blame for involving his younger brother, thanks to which Józef was sent to the Urals for just five years.

Exile to Sakhalin

In May 1887 the 21-year-old Bronisław wrote to his father and siblings: “Goodbye. When I return in 15 years, I will need your experience and advice … Do not give in to sadness, father, my beloved, as you have to accept what cannot be reversed or changed.” Józef Senior, until his last days, fought for his son’s early release. He wrote a number of pleas to Tsar Alexander III and then to his successor Nicholas II.

Two hundred felons were transported to the Sakhalin Island prison in Russia’s Far East. Just like the rest of the prisoners, Bronisław logged in the forest, which was very hard work. He slept in the carpenter’s camp, on his coat on the floor. In order not to lose his mind, he collected plants and created a herbarium. As time passed, he was directed to work at the prison’s administration office. After a year, he was allowed to live outside the prison, under police supervision, without the right to leave the island. With other inmates who were allowed to live outside the camp, they set up a small farm where they cultivated vegetables and bred animals.

Bronisław made scientific observations about the weather which were eventually published. His advice was sought in helping to collect ethnographic material for the then developing museum in Alexandrovsk on Sakhalin Island. He became absorbed in this work, meeting and studying the indigenous people. He learned the indigenous language of the Nivkh people and taught their children to read and write in Russian. He started documenting local fairy tales, songs and legends. Bronisław’s meeting with Lev Yakovlev, tasked by the authorities with conducting a census of the indigenous populations, proved to be a breakthrough moment. Soon after, he published a number of articles describing the life and needs of the Nivkh people. He was concerned that the local customs and language would soon disappear and called for schools and hospitals to help support the local populations. For a short period of time, he was employed by a museum in Vladivostok where he got to know ethnic groups and minorities better, including the Ainu people, the Orok, the Ulch and the Nanai. The Ainu people began to call him a brother, defender and friend. He proposed various legal regulations relating to, for example, self-government, an alcohol sales ban and lifting obligatory military service for indigenous people, and again appealed to the authorities to invest in the region by building schools and hospitals.

Later, Bronisław travelled to Japan for ethnographic research trips. As he knew the local languages, he was useful as a researcher. The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, however, forced him to return to Sakhalin.

Recordings                                                                                                                              

Bronisław photographed the locals and recorded their songs on Edison’s phonograph. In the 1980s, the Japanese managed to recreate the recordings and save them on more modern devices. Bronisław was so popular among the locals they wrote a song in his name, which they sang to him when he was leaving the island. He married an Ainu woman, named Cuhsaumma, with whom they had two children, Kiyo and Sukezô. Piłsudski’s descendants, to this day, live in Japan.

Bronisław worked with indigenous groups who did not interest anyone at the time, and like the Ainu people, were looked down upon and regarded as inferior. He recorded their voices and language and described their lives. They became his second family – and perhaps there were even a replacement for his first. When he returned to Poland, he was a different person – marked by his marriage to a “savage”, a misfit who was long denied academic qualifications. When the anthropological commission of the Polish Academy of Learning in Kraków nominated him to become its secretary, war broke out and he had to flee. He knew what it was like to always be an outsider and outcast. Maybe this was what killed him. But it also gave him a unique insight into the people that he studied. He left behind rare descriptions of the Nivkh bear celebrations and other customs. 

Return to Poland

In 1903, the Russian Geographic Society awarded Piłsudski a silver medal for his academic achievements. The medal was also granted for the collection of ethnographic exhibits gathered thanks to Piłsudski and exhibited by the Society during a fair in Paris. Neither of his achievements nor his Ainu family, however, managed to stop him from returning to his homeland. Piłsudski took an indirect route on his way back to Poland which was still under partition, as he passed through Japan and the United States. He returned to Kraków in November 1906 and became close with Polish scientists at the Polish Academy of Learning. Nevertheless, he complained: “I returned to my homeland, but I feel that I am being treated as an outsider, a newcomer of unknown descent, a suspicious man who is threatening the existence of rooted people.”

In order to improve his poor health, Bronisław went to the Tatra Mountains in Zakopane. There, after 18 years of separation, he met his family: his brothers, Józef and Jan, and his sister, Ludwika. His father had passed away four years earlier. In Zakopane, Bronisław got to know and befriended his uncle, Stanisław Witkiewicz – the creator of the well-known Zakopane architectural style – and his wife. In the absence of their son – a genius writer and artist who wrote under the name Witkacy – Bronisław lived in the latter’s room. He also befriended a writer named Stefan Żeromski to the extent that he created a character based on Bronisław’s story for his new novel. Together with Józef, they hiked, organised excursions and treks in the mountains.

Despite his very modest means, Bronisław travelled extensively. He visited Paris, London, Vienna, Prague and Lviv. He would stay with Józef and his wife in Kraków and became involved in the work of the Polish Academy of Learning (not without obstacles, as Bronisław’s ethnographic research was rather exotic for his Polish peers) and the Tatra Museum in Zakopane.

Research and war

Józef took a good care of Bronisław, who was financially supported by the extended family. But without a stable job, Bronisław grappled with financial troubles most of his adult life. He received some money from the Polish Academy of Learning where he worked as a secretary for the ethnographic section. He gave lectures on Japan, Sakhalin and Poles in Siberia. He also tried to sell his phonograph recordings to various institutions around the world. He wrote the Gaelic, Oroqen and Ainu language dictionaries and in 1912 the Academy of Learning published an English translation of his Materials on the Ainu language and folklore.

In his translation work, Bronisław was supported by Michał Drzewiecki, a well-known language scholar. In Zakopane, Bronisław was involved in ethnographic research in Podhale, Spis and Orava. He visited Poles, Hungarians and Slovaks, and recorded local slang and expressions, songs and drew pictures of household equipment, clothes and architecture. In 1911, he launched the ethnic studies section of the Tatra Society. Soon afterwards, he came up with the idea of launching a journal about Podhale’s customs and traditions. Titled the Podhale Yearbook, it materialised after the end of the First World War. Moreover, he purchased nearly 200 unique ethnographic exhibits for the Tatra Museum.

When the First World War broke out Bronisław joined the civil guard tasked with patrolling the streets at night. He wanted to be useful. In mid-November 1914, Bronisław was forced to leave Zakopane out of fear of political prosecution. He went to Switzerland and later Vienna. In Switzerland, over four months, he was involved in various initiatives, including fundraising for Polish children in Lithuania, and creating the Committee for Lithuania – an organisation aimed at bringing Poles and Lithuanians closer together. He also worked with publishing houses, writing encyclopaedic entries and became involved in pro-independence activism.

In the winter and spring of 1918, when he was in Paris, he fell ill and spent several months in bed. His condition deteriorated. He suffered from serious depression, a persecution complex, hypertension, hallucinations and malnutrition. He was only 52 years old when, on May 17th 1918, he jumped into the Seine River near Louvre, taking his own life. Six months later, thanks to his brother Józef, Poland regained independence after 123 years of partition. Bronisław was buried at the Montmorency cemetery near Paris, and many years later his symbolic grave was erected at Zakopane’s Pęksowy Brzysk, where all people of outstanding merit for Podhale are buried. The plaque on his grave reads: “A Sakhalin camp labourer, musicologist and researcher of cultures of disappearing Siberian and Podhale people.”

2016 was the 150th anniversary of Bronisław’s birth. On this occasion, the Tatra Museum in Zakopane organised a special exhibition titled Bronisław Piłsudski. The extraordinary brother of the Marshall. The exhibition will run until February 25th 2018 at the Radziwiłł Palace in Vilnius. Bronisław’s photographs can be found at the Ethnological Museum in Leipzig, the National Anthropological Archive in Washington and in museums across Russia.

Translated by Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska

Grzegorz Nurek is a Polish journalist specialising in cultural affairs.

Bronisław Piłsudski