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chapter seven m domesticity (1834–1839) I n the late fall of 1833, Mickiewicz received a visit from his old Petersburg acquaintance Dr. Stanisław Morawski. Besides precious news of mutual friends in Russia—Malewski settling in with his new wife Helena Szymanowska; Pietraszkiewicz exiled to Tobolsk; Zan still in Orenburg; Czeczot languishing in poverty in Tver—Morawski brought Mickiewicz a proposition, hatched, it seems, together with Helena Szymanowska. The proposition was simple: would Mickiewicz consider marrying her sister Celina. As far as the poet was concerned at the time, or so he assured Odyniec, the whole thing was less than serious and he responded in kind, with “a few words said in jest.” Morawski, however, appears to have understood those words in earnest, hence on his part as an opportunity to “join two inseparable friends from school even more closely through bonds of kinship.” On his return to St. Petersburg at the beginning of March, he set to matchmaking. In a diary entry of 7/19 March 1834, Helena recorded that Celina “assented” to the proposition. But her observation that she did so “with joy” was something of a misunderstanding.1 1 With the unexpected death of Maria Szymanowska in 1831, that special world of artistic celebrity in which Celina and Helena had been reared, with its postconcert receptions, daily visits from eminent admirers, brilliant salons, and entertainments, soon evaporated, together with the income. To be sure, the home away from Polish hearth that their mother had managed to establish in St. Petersburg continued to draw the city’s expatriates, but even this began to dissipate. Helena adjusted quickly, finding comfort and stability in her relationship with Malewski. Her younger sister was not as fortunate. Shortly after Maria’s death, and just as Helena was settling into her role as a happy new wife, the twenty-year-old 226 adam mickiewicz Celina was dealt another blow: the young man to whom she had been engaged for over a year had a change of heart. For the introverted, mercurial , and headstrong young woman, the rejection simply hastened a slide from mourning into melancholia. Abandoned by the three people she loved most, Celina decided to return to Warsaw, to her father. Józef Szymanowski had remarried, and relations between stepmother and stepdaughter were immediately strained, which served only to exacerbate what Celina described as her “darkness .” “I am unable to get used to the happiness of so many people,” she wrote to her sister in the spring of 1832. “Everyone appears to love me and is very kind, but even this bothers me; I [always] think they’re making fun of me, since I no longer believe anyone.” Rather than live with her father’s family, she chose to stay with a relative, where she had “a room upstairs and permission not to ever have to go downstairs.” As she confessed to Helena, “I am indifferent to everything , I’d like this lethargy to last as long as possible...I’m like a clock which people wind regularly.” But just as she was getting accustomed to life in the new environment that summer, her father died.2 Orphaned, without resources, and with the prospect of old maidenhood looming, Celina moved in with her maternal grandparents, feeling as if she “were a weight to [her]self and to others.” “I’d be better off with our Parents,” she confided ominously to her sister in October, “even if this means being in the other world.” Plans to return to St. Petersburg, which in any case would have meant the unbearable sight of more family happiness and more well-meaning but ineffectual solicitude, came to naught. For the next year and a half, Celina vegetated, living off the kindness of her grandparents and tending her younger half-siblings, for whom, as children, she showed little affection. When Helena and Dr. Morawski laid out their plan in March 1834, she acquiesced without giving it much thought, unable to grasp in her apathy, or simply incapable of appreciating, all of the implications of tying her fate to Poland’s beloved, but also a penniless émigré. What she imagined was not, perhaps, so much the celebrity that the match might promise, but rather a return to a prelapsarian world defined by celebrity.3 Celina had had no particular attachment to Mickiewicz. Their relationship, such as there could have been between a fractious teenager and a man twice her age but unfolding over...

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