Boże, coś Polskę

“Boże, coś Polskę” is a Polish patriotic hymn that enters the novel not through an official ceremony but in the trembling voice of a destitute old man sweeping a street near the prison. Its plea for divine protection of the king carries national devotion into a scene of poverty and decay, making the song a small but pointed counterpoint to the empire’s confident public emblems and the fragile social world they claim to unite.

The Song and Its Historical Resonance

The song is identified in a note as a Polish hymn that at the time almost served as a second national anthem. Its verses remember Poland as having been surrounded by the radiance of power and glory and shielded from disasters; they then turn from remembrance to supplication, asking at God’s altars that the king be preserved. The song therefore joins patriotic memory to prayer. Its political object is a king, but its language entrusts protection to God.

That combination matters in a novel set in Stanislaviv around 1900, in Galicia, a culturally diverse province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The narrative’s historical world is associated with the myth of Felix Austria: an image of a vanished society imagined as prosperous, tolerant, and multicultural, even as the story anticipates the upheavals to come. The Polish hymn does not simply repeat the empire’s official vocabulary. It speaks in the name of Poland and asks for the preservation of its king, placing a particular national allegiance within a city whose public life is saturated with imperial symbols.

The Sweeper’s Performance

The song is heard during the narrator’s walk through a poor quarter near the prison. The surrounding streets are blind alleys, knee-deep in foul, dark slush. Courtyard wells are whitened with pigeon droppings; bird and bat wings spread among tangled galleries, while torn rags dry or rot in the stench. This is not the polished civic setting of a parade. It is an overcrowded, neglected urban landscape in which the signs of official order cannot make deprivation disappear.

A small, rounded iron door, partly sunk into the ground, creaks open. An old, hunched man emerges in a long black caftan held by a cord. He is thin and ragged, nearly toothless, with a few grey tufts on his shining scalp; nevertheless, he sets about sweeping the pavement, lifting dust and sending dry fragments of mud flying. As he works, he grumbles and chews at the words of an old song. The narrator recognizes it as “L’hymne populaire pour le bonheur du Roi,” the popular hymn for the king’s happiness, and hears the old man’s voice tremble, with a whistle in his lungs.

The text then gives the Polish lyrics in full. They move through protection, threatened misfortune, supplication before the altars, and the final request that the Lord preserve the king. The surrounding narrative supplies no account of the singer’s identity or personal history, and none is needed to make the scene resonant: the old man’s frailty, his labor with a broom, and the hymn’s appeal to powers of protection are set beside one another. A public song survives here as the private, breath-strained act of a man at the edge of the city’s attention.

Imperial Emblems and Urban Contradictions

The hymn’s scene is framed by a striking contrast between imperial display and material hardship. Even in the slum streets, portraits of the emperor sway in the wind. They show the crowned double-headed eagle bearing a sword and sceptre, accompanied by the Latin motto “Indivisibiliter Ac Inseparabiliter” and the words “Felix Austria.” A note explains that the first phrase means “Indivisible and inseparable” and was the motto of Austria-Hungary; the second is associated with the saying that others should wage war while fortunate Austria marries. These slogans promise permanence and happy continuity. The surrounding mud, refuse, hunger, and precarious lives make that promise look less secure.

The hymn adds another register to the same public landscape. The emperor’s portraits announce dynastic authority, while the old man’s Polish song asks God to preserve a king. The two forms of loyalty are not explained as a direct confrontation, but their proximity makes the streets feel politically layered rather than uniform. In a city defined by a mixture of ethnicities, languages, and religions, the song’s Polish words insist on a national and devotional voice within the imperial setting. Its appeal to divine shelter also echoes the gap between grand emblems of protection and the exposed lives visible below them.

Recurrence of Imperial Language

Imperial celebration elsewhere in the novel gives this contrast a broader frame. A newspaper account dated 19 August 1900 describes Stanislaviv’s elaborate festivities for the seventieth birthday of Emperor Franz Joseph I. The city is decorated with flowers and banners, and a military parade proceeds from the barracks through named streets, accompanied by a railway orchestra, volunteer firefighters, and a crowd of residents. The emperor’s birthday makes civic unity into a public spectacle, organized through ceremony, procession, and the presence of the population.

Yet the city’s social and political life is never reduced to that spectacle. At a gathering in a glass-and-wood pavilion, men argue about municipal and parliamentary elections, alleged electoral fraud, and the political participation of people who cannot yet vote under the country’s law. Discussion of the Russian-led intervention in China likewise exposes the self-justifying language of great powers: Petro describes Russia’s claim that military action is not a war but an effort to suppress an uprising and reach an understanding with the Chinese government. The hymn’s prayer for a king belongs to this wider field of political speech, where allegiance, authority, and protection are repeatedly voiced but never made uncomplicated.

The imperial ideal also returns at the novel’s end as a personal metaphor. The narrator declares her love to be solid, infallible, and eternal, comparing it to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Around that declaration, however, the house is filling with smoke and its contents are melting, collapsing, and disappearing in the fire; in the resulting lucidity, she recognizes the illusion in which she has lived. Read against this ending, the song’s request that God preserve a king acquires an additional resonance: appeals to permanence endure, but they cannot by themselves prevent historical or domestic worlds from coming apart. The hymn’s quiet presence among the city’s poor thus helps the novel hold together two realities—the desire for protection and continuity, and the visible vulnerability of the people and structures expected to embody them.