Territory or country? a study on the notion of ojczyzna (homeland) in the early 1900s poland

After the Polish uprising of 1863, the Polish-speaking intelligentsia living in the territory of the former Gran Duchy of Lithuania became the object of a repressive tsarist policy. At the beginning of the XX Century, when the Polish-speaking intelligentsia could finally participate in the active political life, its national identity had changed quite strongly. Social changes, the progressive transformation of a gentry-based social system as well as the emergence of new social actors and the politicization of national movements (first of all, of the Lithuanian one within the territories of historical Lithuania), stimulated the process of conceptual change in the local political discourse. The change of national and territorial self-perception was quite clearly recorded in the concept of fatherland (“ojczyzna”)