VMs: Tenth Pavilion Letter

["DANA SCOTT" <dscott520@xxxxxxx>]

The following is a letter written by Ethel Voynich to the Librarian of The 
London College of Economics:

"When it became evident that Bardowski, and Kunicki were likely to be 
executed, the Polish 'Proletariat' group decided to attempt a rescue.  The 
success of their scheme, which included tunnel, rope-ladder, boat, and other 
elaborate preparations, depended on accurate timing by means of a signal to 
be given from the ramparts of the Citadel to the watchers below the cliffs.  
The signaller must have access to the ramparts during the night, and must 
therefore know the passwords.  The 'Proletariat' applied to the Russian 
'Narodnaya Volia' to lend a volunteer who could win the confidence of the 
gendarmerie officers in charge and obtain the passwords.  My husband, 
Wilfred Michael Voynich (Wojnicz in Polish; born Kovno 1865; died New York 
1930), then a student at Moscow University, had joined the 'Narodnaya 
Volia'.  The assignment was offered to him because, in addition to certain 
other qualifications, he was a stranger to Warsaw and its police, and spoke 
Russian without any Polish accent.  (Though a Pole, he had grown up in 
Lithuania, where Polish culture was suppressed and all education 
compulsorily russified.)  Accordingly, provided with Russian passport and 
introductions, and with money to squander, he went to Warsaw, frequented the 
nightly card parties in the officers' quarters of the Citadel, and quickly 
won the favour of Lieut. Col. Bielanowski of the gendarmerie.
    At that time the position of the gendarme officers in Warsaw was one of 
painful isolation.  Polish society pointedly ignored their existence, only 
the most abandoned women would speak to them voluntarily, and even their own 
Russian colleagues of the regular army were sometimes but officially polite. 
 Bielanowski in particular, a renegade Pole of bad reputation, ambitious 
and disappointed, found himself socially a leper.  He was delighted to 
welcome a young man who lost money gracefully at cards and who sniggered 
over his anecdotes of how to obtain useful information from unwilling 
witnesses.  In time, to save the trouble of escorting him to the gates in 
the small hours, my husband was given the passwords.
    The preparations were almost completed when a bague hint from a traitor 
in another branch led to a search and to the discovery of the tunnel.  
Investigations and arrests followed; Bardowski, Kunicki, and two others were 
hanged, and Bielanowski revenged himself by compelling my husband to witness 
the execution and telling his mother that he had been shot.

"The Origins Of Polish Socialism, The History and Ideas of the First Polish 
Socialist Party 1878-1886, by Lucjan Blit (Cambridge, At The University 
Press 1971, pp.136-137).

"Chapter 7: The Government's Revenge
7. Mrs. E.L. Woynicz, letter to the Deputy Librarian, London School of 
Economics and Political Science, Woynicz Collection at the British Library 
of Political and Economic Science."
("The Origins Of Polish Socialism", L. Blit, p. 153.)



Regards,
Dana Scott


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