We don’t count on heaven, with all our cares we go straight to the forest We get up with the Devil, we eat with the Devil, with the Devil we do everything
We don’t know the Our Father, nor God’s mercy Speaking in a broken “Ruski” dialect that I will not attempt to render into English (to do so would require the facility, and the willingness, to reproduce the cadences of music-hall Cockney or blackface minstrelsy), the two devils construct the Polish imagination of Ruthenian superstition: While Nuncius apos- tolicus, the devil of heretics, provides a long speech in learned Latin peri- ods,3 4 the bumbling Bies and his brother Dietko,3 s from Ruthenia and Podole respectively, give a humorous account of the backward eastern borderlands from which they hail. 32 In contrast, Jews and heretics (the latter nearly always depicted as ethnically German) figured as interior enemies, the more dangerous for their common trait of scholarly book-learning.33 The Horrible InfernalParliament (Sejm piekielny straszliwy), a best-selling satirical poem in which various devils report to “Lucyper” in Hell, brings both stereotypes into clear juxtaposition. Jesuit plays and popular satires featured soliloquies by devils and peasants, delivered in a sort of music-hall caricature of Ruthenian diction and poking gentle fun at the supposed Ruthenian tendency toward pagan superstition.
Indeed in Polish discourse Ruthenia figures largely as the symbol of rural ignorance, a “Wild Field,” its people “miserable as animals.”3i To Polish audiences, Ruthenians stimulated paternalistic pity more than fear or anxiety. Klonowic follows up this rather damning depiction with a long, ostensibly humorous account of the magical means by which one “Fiedora” impelled the affections of her beloved “Fiedor” - thus softening his critique and signaling his debt to Apuleius and Theocritus. I saw myself a milky stream, oozing from a rope: I saw how enchantresses, from the blue sky Called down with muttered verses Lightning, whirlwind, hail, thunder and rain Thrown by a curse, to destroy the fields of grain. Here I saw decrepit hags, flying in the dark I saw old women flying by night. Poison and enchantment rule Ruthenia The Ruthenian lands swarm with witches.
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