how come the country is fecked?
One of the reasons was that cirumstances forced the Poles to sit out the culturally prolific 19th century -- a time of stepped-up foreign travel and cultural sharing. That was largely when the outside world first learnt about Russian vodka, caviare, ballet, Tolstoi, Chekhov and Dostoevsky; French gourmet food, champagne, cognac and vintage wines, Dumas, Hugo, Verlaine, impressionists, the Eiffel Tower; gin & tonic, fox hunts, Scottish bagpipes, Dickens, Carroll, Kipling; Italian opera and pasta, the Spanish corrida, Dutch windmills and tulips, etc., etc. The Poles meanwhile had seen their country carved up and sheer national survival was at stake, hence culture had to become prominently Polonocentric and largely unintelligible to the outside world. Therefore only exiles like Chopin, émigrés like Skłodowska-Curie and translinguals like Conrad could achieve any measure of international prominence. A mere 20 years of a freedom and another half-century of foreign subjugation. Now Poland finds itself in a state of economic subjugation, another situation conducive to imitation of things foreign rather than the development of an exportable, authetnic Polish culture.