Little accompolished these days—on vacation. Except that I have been monitoring the growth of my Polish moustache, polskie wasy, and a bit of beard, broda. Inspired by the whiskrage of Jerzy Hoffman’s movie trilogy, and some highly impressionistic, rigorously unscientific surveys of Polish social portraiture, I’m convinced that facial hair matters in Polish cultural semiotics. Now, no doubt, facial hair matters in the semiotics of all national cultures, but I’ll speculate that it matters just a little bit more in the Polish experience. Moustache and beard seem more visible in Polish imagery generally, and more positive emblems overall, even as, in contemporary times, they may be vanishing from the public face.
The most important moustache of the post-Communist era, and one of the hirsute reasons we have a post-Communist era at all, belongs, of course, to Lech Walesa—a Solidarnosc founder, a Nobel Peace Laureate, and the eventual president of Poland in its first genuine, democratically-elected government, post-WW II. A formidable horse shoe of a moustache, it spanned his mandible like a brass knuckle for his face, for the pounding of some sense into the clean-shaven, chinless cranium of Wojciech Jaruzelski. Note that all of Jaruzelski’s immediate forebears—Gomulka, Gierek, and Kania—sported not a hair on their dour and jowly visages. No semblance of a Party here. Walesa’s hyperbolic hyperbola proved a glorious band, a signature arc, a great triumphal arch, both stubborn and roguish. And further note that Poland’s previous political resurrection in 1919-20, proceeded under the muzzle hair of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, whose thick, drooping shaving brush rivaled the 19th-century stylings of Friedrich Nietszche—a fancier of Polish political heritage. In fact, reviewing the portrait imagery of all of Poland’s most successful practitioners of rule—Mieszko I, Boleslaw Chrobry, Kazimierz the Great, Stefan Batory, and Jan Sobieski III—one finds the wings of an impressive moustache, noses with dual horse-tail standards.
For most of my adult life, I have grown and worn facial hair, at least a moustache, on occasion, a fuller beard, and most recently, a salt and peppery short cropped scruff. Except for an early college beard, which occasioned my first published prose—though anonymous—these growths were cosmetic, aesthetic attempts to mitigate or distract from the flaws of an imperfect face: receding hairline, too-full lips, narrow jaw. My early college beard quite self-consciously declared a principled non-conformity, but in truth this late adolescent declaration of non-conformity came rather quickly to seem a stereotype, an age-appropriate non-conformity, that is to say, conformity. So, my intermittent moustaches, beards, goatees, sideburns have never amounted to more than accents, diacritical marks on a blank but increasingly creased and spotty parchment.
But for Poles, a moustache is a statement, a declaration, a manifesto even, one tending toward the extravagant, the determined, the romantic. As Davies has noted, “Male hair-styles tended to be exotic.” (I, 248) The fabulous eastern (Sarmatian) origins of the Polish nobility, the szlachta, account for much of this exoticism, along with the nation’s long contact with Cossacks, Crimean Tartars, Ottoman Turks, and even the Mongol hordes of the then recently departed Ghengis. I’m partial, myself, to the Cossack influence, the moustache with drooping wing feathers, tendrils that curl with the slightest hint of dangle. A true Cossack, provided he survived long enough, might sport a growth that could be worn over the ear on a windy day, but I’m not a Cossack, only respectful of them. They had some style. And so my most recent homage to the facial traditions of my ancestors. To date, my efforts have been both complimented and twitted as Don Quixote and Burl Ives: fair enough, but a Cossack Don Quixote, a free-booting and blood-thirsty Burl Ives, perhaps an Ataman Sanders of a Ukrainian Fried Chicken franchise. Have your fun.
