| ▲ | akho 4 days ago |
| Can someone give a source for communists banning polonaise? It sounds implausible, and googling did not produce a satisfying result. |
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| ▲ | krige 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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). |
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| ▲ | akho 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | alxlaz 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | akho 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | alxlaz 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > 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. |
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| ▲ | where-group-by 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | HPsquared 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | everdrive 4 days ago | parent [-] | | >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. | | |
| ▲ | floydnoel 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | olddustytrail 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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". |
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| ▲ | p_l 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Imperial Russia, not communists |
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| ▲ | amszmidt 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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). | | |
| ▲ | vkazanov 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | p_l 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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" |
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| ▲ | anticodon 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | sparky_z 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I wouldn't describe 29 years as "a very short period of time". | | | |
| ▲ | akho 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | And the de facto Russian national anthem at the time was a polonaise. |
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| ▲ | akho 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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