National Romanticism: The Formation of National Movements

Adam Mickiewicz: Pan Tadeusz

ADAM MICKIEWICZ: PAN TADEUSZ Title: Pan Tadeusz, czyli Ostatni zajazd na Litwie: Historia szlachecka z roku 1811 i 1812 we dwunastu księgach wierszem (Pan Tadeusz or the last foray in Lithuania: History of the szlachta from 1811 and 1812 in twelve parts) Originally published: First published in Paris in 1834 (in two volumes) Language: Polish Modern Polish edition: Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz czyli ostatni zajazd na Litwie: Historia szlachecka z r. 1811 i 1812 we dwunastu księgach wierszem , ed. Konrad Górski, (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1989). English edition: Pan Tadeusz or the last foray in Lithuania: History of szlachta from 1811 in twelve parts, translated by Kenneth R. Mackenzie (London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1986), the excerpts used are from pp. 3–6; 562– 568, and 578–584. About the author Adam Mickiewicz [1798, Zaosie near Nowogródek (Bel. Novaharodak presentday Belarus) – 1855, Istanbul]: poet. Acknowledged as the greatest Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz was born into a family of petty gentry in the Lithuanian part of the former Commonwealth. During his studies in Wilno (Lit. Vilnius), he coorganized a Polish patriotic Burschenschaft called the Towarzystwo Filomatów (Philomaths’ Society), in which young students from Lithuania learned together and read each other’s poems. The Russian authorities dissolved this ‘dangerous’ organization and the students were deported to Siberia and other parts of Russia. Before the collapse of the Towarzystwo Filomatów, Mickiewicz published his first volume of ‘Poetry’ (1822), which is considered to have opened the period of Romanticism in Polish literature (he also prepared a theoretical introduction presenting the program of romantic poetry, arguing that it has its origins in medieval lyric and in folklore). In his poems, Mickiewicz directed the usual romantic obsessions with agony, horror and death to specifically national subjects. After months of imprisonment in a former Basilian monastery (later adapted as the setting of the third part of Dziady), Mickiewicz spent several years in Russia where he met Pushkin, the revolutionaries Alexander Bestuzhev and Kondraty Ryleyev, and the intellectual elite of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Starting in 1829, Mickiewicz began his travels throughout Western Europe. In 1830 he unsuccessfully tried to return to the ‘Congress Kingdom’ in 212 THE NATIONALIZATION OF SPACE order to participate in the uprising. In 1832 he moved to Dresden and finally to Paris, where he published a series of celebrated poems and radical political articles, and also delivered lectures on Slavonic literature at the Collège de France. He was radical in all these fields: his journalism advocated socialist ideas and his poetry canonized Polish Messianism, an inseparable mixture of religious, social and national beliefs bound up with Poland imagined as the ‘Christ of nations.’ His lectures were under surveillance by the French secret police and by agents of the Russian embassy, and were finally called off for their democratic tendency. In the 1840s Mickiewicz became a member of an Adventist sect— fashionable in émigré intellectual circles— led by Andrzej Towiański (1799–1878). The group was characterized by sophisticated religious speculations and professed the brotherhood of nations, which eventually led them to insert the actions of the partitioning powers into a scheme of universal salvation. What most shocked the émigré society was their appeal to forgive the tsar everything he had done to Poland. The Towiański affair cost Mickiewicz much of his authority among Polish exiles. Mickiewicz, however, remained active in the political and social life of Polish immigrants in France. During the revolution of 1848, he organized Polish forces to support the struggle for Italian independence and unity. He also tried to form a Jewish Legion. In 1849 he joined the radical democratic newspaper La Tribune des Peuples. After the ‘Spring of Nations,’ Mickiewicz lost his position at the Collège de France, and worked as a librarian. He died in Turkey , trying once again to organize Polish military units, this time to support the Turks in the Crimean War. Mickiewicz’s impact on Polish culture and collective memory can only be compared to that of Henryk Sienkiewicz. That he became a ‘cult figure’ after his death was partly due to the efforts of his son, Władysław Mickiewicz, who collected and selected documents and works of his father and prepared a gigantic biography (published in 1890–1895), in which Mickiewicz was presented not only as a brilliant poet but also as a patriot and a moral authority. Władysław Mickiewicz did not hesitate to destroy those documents that did not fit the image of...