Letter from Poland.

 

Four Seasons. The weather and the Polish consciousness

By Anna Piwowarska

18.01.08

Poland is cold at the moment. Very cold. Over the weekend it got to minus eight degrees but it felt much colder. Now, some people think that talking about the weather is boring but I couldn’t disagree more. For me, the weather is fascinating. I think it dictates a large part of my life, particularly in Poland.
When I first came here I didn’t realize how much people actually talked about the weather. I thought only the English did that – joking about the one day of sunshine a year or about the constant drizzle. I thought that in mainland Europe, countries that had proper, beautiful, changing seasons didn’t discuss them. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The weather is an important element of daily conversations in Poland. I never knew there were so many types of cold. For example, recently we’ve been having a period of dry cold. But there’s also damp cold which is warmer than dry cold but thought by many to be worse. Dry cold seems to be healthier as it kills bacteria. I’m not so sure. It may kill bacteria but I haven’t been able to feel my toes for the majority of the weekend.
There’s also the subject of air pressure. Everyone in Poland seems to be aware of what the air pressure is. I never heard anyone in the UK talk about air pressure – maybe about the rain but definitely not about air pressure. The other day at work, everyone was talking about the fact that the air pressure was high and that’s why everyone felt the worse for wear. You see, I would have never thought of that. I just thought I everyone was still recovering from their various excesses on New Years Eve.
The weather has always been an important part of the Polish consciousness throughout history. Mickiewicz in Pan Tadeusz uses the sky with its different types of clouds it to illustrate the mentality of different Poles. Reymont, who won the 1924 Nobel Prize for Literature for his naturalist masterpiece The Peasants, observes the changing four seasons with almost photographic precision. Reymont is to the Polish seasons and landscape what Thomas Hardy was to the English countryside. The action in The Peasants is determined by the laws of nature, which in turn decide a great deal about the fate of man. The book is divided into four parts - spring, summer, autumn and winter. Each of the seasons determines a different type of work in the field or around the house. One could even say that nature is the main character of the story. Another great Pole, pianist Artur Rubinstein describes the Polish seasons in his memoirs, entitled My young years; he writes:
“The seasons, for example, are authentic. There is no mistake about them, they are what a symphony ought to be: four perfect movements in intimate harmony with one another… I have a marked preference for the Polish autumn, with its soft and melancholic twilight, when the country painted in every shade of gold, brown and yellow, becomes the natural setting for some of Chopin’s loveliest nocturnes”
My childhood memories of Poland are also set against a backdrop of clear-cut Polish seasons. Black and white photos show me standing next to mounds of snow higher than me; characteristically coloured ‘Orwo’ photos show me and my cousin playing in haystacks on the Tatra Mountains in late august sunshine. I remember the shiny surface of chestnuts in dappled autumn light, or the cool water of the Wielkopolski Lake in early summer when it was just about warm enough to take a dip. It seems that the grey communist Poland, which I grew up in, has somehow registered in ‘Technicolor’ in my memory. My nostalgia for Poland, once I had left, often manifested itself as the Poland of changing seasons. In fact, I always found the UK to be far greyer as a child, even though in reality it was a much more colourful place than Poland in the eighties.
Also the name Poland subconsciously relates the country to weather – cold weather to be precise. I remember at my primary school in Gloustershire, my classmates asked me whether I lived in an igloo. I was appalled at their ignorance but then they were only seven. Even today, many of my friends who I grew up with ask me whether it gets very cold in Poland. Yes, I reply but not that cold. I sometimes get the feeling that to our Western neighbors, we’re lumped together with Russia meteorologically.
I sometimes think that my obsession with the weather is hereditary. My grandmother, who is Bulgarian, and lives in Varna, bases her whole life on the weather. She focuses on magnetic storms in particular, which she can ‘feel’ the day before they arrive, as well as the ‘wyzduch’, the sea breeze, which is as varied as are the types of cold that we have in Poland. I often wonder whether when I’m eighty, I’ll be rambling about the weather constantly. I guess there’s nothing wrong with having your head in the clouds sometimes… particularly in a country with such beautiful seasons, such as Poland.