Adam Mickiewicz: The Life of a Romantic

3. Exile (1824–1829)

chapter three m exile (1824–1829) A fter a journey of two weeks, Mickiewicz, Malewski, Jeżowski, Sobolewski, and Pietraszkiewicz arrived in St. Petersburg on 9/21 November 1824, two days after the Neva had inundated the city.Thedevastationof thefloodnotwithstanding—thousands were killed and hundreds of buildings damaged—the city filled the young men with awe: One can’t compare it with anything. The magnificence of the various buildings, their number and beauty surpasses the imagination, the wide streets, the sidewalks covered with dressed stone, the granite lining the canals and banks of the Neva astonish with their size. I who, I think, know how to walk, tire rather quickly after traversing a street or two, because they are immeasurably longer than ours. Having finally found a place to stay in a city notorious for its dearth of lodging even in the best of times and for commensurate prices, the young men set out to gawk like the provincials they were at the architectural, commercial, and cultural wonders of “Peter’s creation,” the capital of the Russian empire.1 1 The streets all ran toward the river: Wide and long like ravines in the mountains. Enormous houses of brick and of stone, Clay on marble and marble on clay; And all of them even, their roofs and their walls, Like a corps in an army outfitted anew. exile (1824–1829) 57 The houses are plastered with plaques and with signs; Amid writing so varied and in so many tongues Eye and ear wander as if in the tower of Babel. (“Petersburg”; Dz. 3:275) St. Petersburg of the 1820s was a metropolis with a population of over 400,000. It was not only the hub of an expanding empire, with a massive bureaucracy revolving slavishly around the all-powerful tsar, but the seat now of a triumphant European power, whose military and political might was expressed in its features. Alexander I had set about rebuilding the city to reflect its imperial pretensions, quite literally: the heart of St. Petersburg was turned into a gigantic parade ground; its most prominent edifices—the Senate, the Admiralty, the Kazan Cathedral, the Ministry of War, the theaters—were all meant to evoke imperial Rome. Like its model, the city teemed with diplomats and artists, craftsmen and condotieri, petitioners, proselytizers, and mountebanks from all corners of the empire and beyond. It was this cosmopolitanism, epitomized by brilliant salons and an opera and theaters that hosted some of the most illustrious stars of the day, that in the teens and twenties attracted arguably the most talented generation of Russian writers, although St. Petersburg still had to share them with Russia’s old capital, Moscow. As Pietraszkiewicz noted, there were bookstores aplenty, selling the latest in European literature, in both the original and in translation, and to a lesser extent the domestic product, which in any case was amply showcased in some dozen journals and numerous almanacs.2 St. Petersburg’s cultural vibrancy was, however, a symptom of a society undergoing a profound sociopolitical transition, with its attendant hopes, tensions, disappointments, and crises. And in this regard, as Mickiewicz and his Russian contemporary Aleksandr Pushkin both came to understand in retrospect, the flood of 1824 could be read as something of an unsettling omen. Like Poles, progressive elements of Russian society had been buoyed by certain gestures on the part of the monarch in the years immediately following Napoleon’s defeat. Flush with the victory over France and Russia’s ostensible entry into Europe, but at the same time “infected” by French republican ideas, they saw in Alexander a ruler who, it seemed, shared many of their notions about reforming a backward empire. But the hopes of Russian progressives for the abolition of serfdom or even a constitution proved to be as unwarranted as the Poles’ for the restoration of their state. Alexander’s increasingly reactionary policies after 1820 revealed the face of a true Russian autocrat, fueling expressions of disillusionment proportional to expectations raised. 2 Within days of their arrival, Mickiewicz and his fellow exiles reported to the minister of education Aleksandr S. Shishkov, who also happened to be one of the most fossilized 58 adam mickiewicz of Russia’s literary classicists. Perhaps because of his antipathy toward Novosiltsov—and in this he was far from an exception among Russian officials—Shishkov proved unusually solicitous toward the young...