SOURCE: Coleman, Arthur Prudden. “Mickiewicz and Northern Balladry.” InThe Slavonic Year-Book (American Series, I): Being Volume XX of the Slavonic and East European Review, pp. 173-84. Menasha, WI: The George Banta Publishing Company, 1941.

In four lines of the opening stanza of the Ode to Youth Mickiewicz describes in vivid images the world which he desired, as poet, to espouse. “O Youth!” he says,

                                                                                … give me wings
And I will soar above the callous earth,
Into the wonder realm of phantoms and chimeras,
Where enthusiasm creates a world of marvels.

Among the factors which impelled Mickiewicz to embrace this world, by no means least in importance was the northern ballad. How did the balladry of the north come to play so large a part in the poet's growth, in what manner did it present itself to his consciousness and how did it become a vital part of his experience? These are the questions which this study will endeavor to answer.

There was probably never a time in Polish literary history when the poet relied less on inner experience and so much on outward reality as the very time when Mickiewicz was born. Reason, not Feeling and the inner life, ruled: poetic models came from France, where the romantic attitude had not yet become the vogue. Life in general was artificial, brittle, worldly, and there seemed no likelihood that there would shortly be a change of mood.

It was the year 1798, when Mickiewicz was born, and “Polishness” was at its lowest ebb in life and literature. According to Mickiewicz himself, “Such general blindness prevailed that people did not believe the oldest things in the world unless they read them in a French journal.”¹ Warsaw had long been a little Paris, and now even in Litwa, where Mickiewicz was born, there could be felt a growing tendency to regard everything Polish with a supercilious air. To many the worst in French life seemed superior to the best in Polish.

“I was brought up by Poles, but not as a Pole,”² said Adam Czarnocki (born 1784), Poland's first Slavicist, and Czarnocki's experience was not an isolated one. It was shared by most Polish youth of the 1790's, not only of the aristocracy, notorious for its Gallomania in every period, but of the gentry, which was normally intensely Polish. For Polish youth in the '90's was tutored and trained by French refugees.

Poland at the end of the eighteenth century was a second France. The realm was overrun with Frenchmen whose flight from the Revolution and the Terror had ended in some sympathetic Polish dwór.³ Once it had been said you could find more Polish money in Paris than in Warsaw: now the tables were turned and the French language at least, if not French money, was as familiar in Warsaw as in Paris. Nothing, moreover, was regarded as contributing so much “tone” to a Polish dwór as the presence of French fugitives, even when these made nuisances of themselves by demanding special living quarters, by spurning Polish soap or by refusing to eat Polish barszcz,⁴ or even by stealing the silver.

The Frenchified young Pole of the '90's and of the early 1800's is exemplified in Mickiewicz's youthful sweetheart, Maryla Wereszczak. The daughter of a distinguished squire whose dwór afforded asylum to a number of French exiles, Maryla read René and La Nouvelle Héloïse, and had no wish to soil the refined taste these encouraged through exposure to the new “northern” element that was creeping into English and German literature. Maryla shunned the dark world of wonder and terror evoked by the new literature, and when Jan Czeczot, who served her as a book-scout in Wilno, sent her one of the popular specimens of this, a novel by Ann Radcliffe, Maryla wrote back, “The romances of Radclif I never read!”⁵

Mickiewicz had a totally different education from that received by either Czarnocki or Maryla. He was educated as a Pole, thanks to the reforms of the Polish Commission of Education which created the county school in Nowogródek; and he escaped the Gallic infection until it was too late to cause him permanent injury. Mickiewicz had both a father and a mother of the intensely Polish, old-fashioned stamp which Poles call “kontuszowy”⁶ and they would have despised both themselves and their son if they had reared him as anything but the most Polish of Poles. Thus Mickiewicz learned as a child to honor and prize his native heritage.

It was this heritage which predisposed him to accept the spirit world of the stanza quoted above from the Ode to Youth. As a son of Litwa, Mickiewicz early became familiar with the “world of the marvelous,” which is the universe of the northern ballad and which he was to claim as proper material for Polish poetry.

In Goethe's ballad of The Erl-King, the father, it will be recalled, sees the gray, wind-tossed willows as just willows, nothing more.⁷ His son, on the other hand, sees in the oddly-shaped branches the daughters of the dread Erl-King. Mickiewicz learned very early in life to see with the eyes of that son, and he lived always with half his mind at least in the realm of the supernatural and unreal. There lakes and streams, swamps and pine groves all had personality, and the moody country side was haunted by weird creatures from the minds of the superstitious peasants. These told the boy how the mist above a woodland lake was an enchantress whose raspberry lips and seductive plaint lured huntsmen to death.⁸ They made bridges become for him places where dead lovers wandered, and thickets the home of apparitions that made horses rear with fright and plunge into the stream.⁹ They told of sunken villages,¹⁰ of ghostly knights in ruined castles, and of offerings to the uneasy dead.¹¹

The more fearful elements of northern balladry were early presented to Mickiewicz. These he learned from a certain Blażej, whom he nicknamed Ulysses because of his fantastic adventures. Most of Blażej's tales were about his old master, a Freemason and, therefore, according to peasant belief, in league with the Devil. Freemasons could ride through the air in sleighs in summertime, Blażej testified, for he had seen his master do it, and they could curse a man, so that he would die in the full vigor of manhood, for he had seen this happen to a man on whom, for breaking his oath, a conclave of Masons had invoked a sentence of doom. Such supernatural occurrences were common in Nowogródek, according to Blażej!¹²

Happenings no less wonderful, though usually within the bounds of human possibility, came to Mickiewicz's ears as a child from his parents' friends, for Nowogródek was wild border country and violence was by no means uncommon. A certain neighbor whose youthful fire had not been dimmed by age told him the stirring tale of how she eloped with the man she loved, how, defying her parents, she dashed to the church on a wild charger, pistols cocked, ready to shoot anyone who tried to stop her.¹³

Finally, the Mickiewiczes' own experience, their long feud with the murderous Jan Soplica, who threatened to burn the Mickiewicz family in all its branches out of house and home, was itself a living ballad. Soplica was for them like a horrible creature from the other world whose appearance was a never absent dread.

Thus daily existence in Nowogródek possessed many of the elements of balladry.

Yet, for all this, Mickiewicz might have lived and died and never have known that what the peasants confided to him in their nightly stories around the bakehouse stove and what he heard whispered in his own family was literary material if he had not met similar themes in books. These he did meet, however, very early in life, and the credit for providing the books goes to Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz.

Niemcewicz was a pioneer among Poles in enthusiasm for the northern ballad. It was his translations from northern balladry which undoubtedly planted the seed that bore fruit in Mickiewicz's Kovno verses.

When Mickiewicz was a boy Niemcewicz's fame was tremendous among the Polish people. Warsaw critics might call him “an old granny,”¹⁴ and Warsaw hostesses shudder at his taste in jokes,¹⁵ but the majority of Poles regarded Niemcewicz as a pillar of fire in the nation's darkest night. They linked his name with Kościuszko's, recalling that both had been patriots in an unpatriotic generation, that both had fought in the War of Independence, and that they were fellow-prisoners in the fortress of Peter and Paul and fellow-exiles in England. People honored Niemcewicz especially for repatriating the errant Polish Muse and for reclothing her in simple Polish dress, as he did in The Deputy's Return. It is no wonder Mickiewicz said that Niemcewicz always had something “gripping and interesting”¹⁶ and that he was “superior to the whole of the French school,” or that he paid tribute to Niemcewicz's moulding influence on his own poetic development in the words, “What name can awaken in the heart of the young Polish poet more lively feelings of honor and admiration than the name of Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz? From our mothers we used to hear tales of his deeds and adventures. His songs gave us our earliest sense of the sound of poetry: they are our earliest poetic acquaintances.”¹⁷

In the summer of 1802, on his way home from the United States, Niemcewicz whiled away the tedious hours of the crossing by translating some of the ballads recently published as Tales of Wonder by the celebrated “Monk” Lewis. Two of those he did were Lewis's own tale of “Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogen” and Taylor's translation of Bürger's Lenora. Niemcewicz called his Polish version of the former “Alondzo i Helena” and of the latter, “Małwina.” Both poems were published in 1803 in a volume entitled Various Writings.

Since everything Niemcewicz wrote had quick and wide circulation, especially in Litwa and there, most of all, among patriots like Nicholas Mickiewicz, a veteran like Niemcewicz of the War of Independence, it is likely that a copy of the volume containing the ballads was not long in reaching the Mickiewicz household. Thus it was probably from his own father, who often read to his sons, that Mickiewicz heard for the first time the stirring tale of the faithless wife in “Alondzo i Helena” whose marriage feast was broken up by an avenging ghost that snatched her off to the grave, and of the spectral flight, in “Małwina” of the deserted maid and her dead knight.

The process of poetic gestation is a long one and unchartable. For years the two themes lay dormant in Mickiewicz's subconsciousness Then, after they had ripened, and combined with other themes, he used them. The “faithless wife” of “Alondzo i Helena” appeared in “The Lilies” (“Lilje”) and the maiden's flight from “Małwina” in “The Flight” (“Ucieczka”). Of all his poems, these two were closest in spirit and meter and theme to Scottish and German balladry.

As for Niemcewicz's further influence, it may have been from him also that the theme of wifely treason, implanted in Mickiewicz's mind by “Alondzo i Helena,” derived a Polish setting. Mickiewicz made his “faithless wife” in “The Lilies” one of the notorious band that indulged in wholesale infidelity while husbands and lovers were fighting with King Bolesław the Brave at the siege of Kiev. Niemcewicz refers to this episode in his story of Margaret, wife of Nicholas of Zębocin, the only wife who remained faithful, in the 1816 edition of his Songs of History. Because of Niemcewicz's popularity, the book's own timeliness and, most of all, the musical settings which accompanied the songs, this work was widely circulated. Perhaps it was while Mickiewicz read this that the old Lewis theme and the new time setting flew together in his mind, advancing “The Lilies” process of creation by another degree.¹⁸

We have seen how Mickiewicz's childhood associations gave him a fund of ballad material and a sense of the forbidding world of the ballad. We have seen also how Niemcewicz introduced him to the ballad as a literary form. What was it that caused Mickiewicz to find his keenest poetic inspiration in the ballad world and to employ the ballad form as the earliest vehicle of his poetic efforts?

The answer is three-fold: first, the spirit of change in the air which induced in Mickiewicz's generation an appetite for something new and, in contrast to the old, something native; second, the great theoretical interest in German balladry which prevailed in Poland; and third, the fact that it was a German ballad which touched off his imagination and fertilized his thinking at the precise moment his genius was ready to function.

In 1800, when the new century was born, Schiller greeted it with a stirring ode in which he cried, “The old forms are toppling!”¹⁹ This was true in Germany, but in Wilno, where Mickiewicz studied, few of the old forms had begun to topple even fifteen years after Schiller's words were written. Wilno was still in 1815 an outpost of pre-Revolution France, and the leaders of Wilno's intellectual life were Gentlemen of the Enlightenment. Proudly regarding themselves as Men of Reason, they were Liberals in principle but actually frightened to death of the Liberal spirit. In Wilno the old forms remained.

The generation that arrived with Mickiewicz was different: change was in its very bearing. Most of the new generation had experienced a mystic agitation when they were mere boys, as their quiet villages were disturbed by the presence of Napoleon or one of his generals. All had been swept into the whirlpool that eddied around Napoleon wherever he went and all had been carried by its current from old moorings. A new spirit was in the air, and it acted on youth as a tonic making them as unlike their elders as if “not just a single generation but a whole century had rolled with its wide wave”²⁰ between the two. Change was bound to come as soon as the new generation assumed an active role.

Change implied that, if Poland had been held in bondage to French culture before, then the French shackles would now be loosened; applied to literature it meant that if Reason had ruled before, Reason's antithesis, Feeling, must now prevail and the “inner life” would become more important than reality.

Polish literature needed change. Thoughtful persons had viewed its condition with uneasy foreboding for a long time. They knew it was unhealthy and readily diagnosed the cause of unhealth as excessive foreignness. But how could the malady be cured, and how could Polish literature be made to speak, once more, for the nation's soul?

Clearly, Poland had to produce a “national” literature if the national culture were to survive. But where were models to be found, and where was inspiration to be drawn for the new venture?

There were two answers: one side said, let us seek inspiration for a national literature in our Middle Ages, as the Germans did when they were in a similar predicament. And the other, let us follow the Germans, to be sure, but not to the Middle Ages. Let us follow them to the place where the best of the German poets found their inspiration: let us go to the source of all poetry, the Folk.

The two principles could not be harmonized. A literary “war” arose, and for a decade the two sides strove with each other in the pages of the literary journals and in brochures. It was a war of the “courtly” and “refined” in literature against the “homespun” and “fantastic.” Soon two rival cults appeared: a cult, on the one hand, of Kochanowski, who came to be idolized as the one who showed how the courtly Latin tradition might be acclimatized in Poland; and on the other, a cult of the Folk.

The second of the two cults brought in its wake an enormous interest in English and Scottish, and especially German balladry. It was with this side that youth was sympathetic, agreeing with Czarnocki's aphorism that it is “among the folk that poetry dwells.”²¹ In the end Mickiewicz became the mouthpiece of this side of the conflict and the shining example of the fructifying effect the folk-born elements of wonder and fantasy which it championed could have on a young man's creative faculties.

As a student in Wilno, Mickiewicz wrote a mass of critical reviews and a number of verses, but all, without exception, bore the marks of that “pseudo-classical slumber”²² in which their author still dreamed. The only poem from the period with any promise of originality in it, and of Polishness, is one which Mickiewicz omitted from his published verses when he brought these out in Wilno in 1822 and 1823. It is the simple ballad “Ucieczka” (“The Flight”), and it was inspired by the theme of what Mickiewicz himself was to call “the queen of ballads,”²³ Bürger's Lenora.

One day, the story is told, Czerniawski, the son of the Professor of Russian Language and Literature in Wilno University, rushed into a conclave of students with the cry that he had discovered “another Lenora!” He began to declaim portions of it and, as he did so, his own enthusiasm was communicated to his friends, with the consequence that the very next day Thomas Zan, one of those who heard him, wrote a Polish Lenora which he called “Neryna,” and Mickiewicz soon after wrote “Ucieczka.”²⁴

The poem which aroused Mickiewicz and gave him in “Ucieczka” his first impulse to the “spontaneous and richly colored ballads” he was soon to write was either Zhukovski's Ludmila or Katenin's Olga. German scholarship assumes²⁵ it was Ludmila, but it seems more likely to have been Olga, since Ludmila (published 1809) was an old story by the time Mickiewicz was a student in Wilno and Olga was not only newly published (1816) but the storm center of an active dispute between the two Russian critics Gnedich and Griboyedov.²⁶ It is not important whether the poem Czerniawski recited was Ludmila or Olga. Whichever it was, the thing that moved Mickiewicz was the action of the poem: this neither the prettifications of Zhukovsky nor the rudeness of Katenin could rob of its deeply moving power. The ghostly flight of a maiden—Lenora, Ludmila, Olga, whichever it was—over the wild night air on a spectral charger in the arms of a dead knight: this was the suggestive element, the flight. Thinking of nothing but this, Mickiewicz called his own ballad after no woman's name, as Thomas Zan did, but by a noun which describes the action, “Ucieczka,” (“The Flight”).

“Ucieczka” is not a copy of Lenora itself or of any of the translations of Lenora. As Cramer wrote of Bürger's own version, “Der Urstoff ist aus einer bekannten Gespenster-historie, aber die ganze Bearbeitung und treffliche Ausführung … ganz Bürgers,”²⁷ so one may say with truth of “Ucieczka,” it is Mickiewicz's in conception and execution. It contains many elements not found in the other Lenoras or in Lenora itself. There is the matchmaker, for example, whose insistence provokes the poem's action; and the confessional; the empty, haunted castle with its terrifying doors and its mastiff on guard; and, finally, the priest beside the newly-turned grave at the end. These are elements intensely characteristic of the life of the folk of Nowogródek, and whether Mickiewicz actually remembered a folk-song which embodied them when he wrote “Ucieczka,” as he said he did,²⁸ or whether the lines which rang the bell of memory in his consciousness were only echoes from Niemcewicz's “Małwina,” the fact remains that Mickiewicz's maid is a girl of Litwa and “Ucieczka” rings true to Litwa's life.

So long as Mickiewicz remained in Wilno he lived too convivially to produce anything original. “The world” was, in very truth, “too much with” him. As in the case of Bürger and the Göttingen Hainbund,²⁹ so with Mickiewicz and his Filomatian associates: they all helped conceive whatever he did.

But in the autumn of 1819 Mickiewicz was sent to Kovno as a teacher in the Polish gymnasium in that town, and at once everything was changed. Kovno was for him what the “Pontic shore” was for Ovid,³⁰ a place of bleakest exile. Now, instead of living the light-hearted “panicz”³¹ life of Wilno which he described himself in the appropriately artificial verses of “Winter in the City” (“Zima miejska”), the young teacher lived, by contrast, like a hermit. “The clock strikes one, two, three … and finally twelve,” he wrote his friends in Wilno, “dull silence everywhere. Only the wind, humming around the cloister walls, and off in the distance the hoot of an owl. My candle has almost burned down: once in a while it flares up, only to die down again. Terrible hour! But never terrible when skies were friendlier. How often then the dearest hour of all! But Memory, be gone! Those times are fled forever! … All I can do is take my pen, and in the silence … write to you.”³²

Kovno was what Mickiewicz needed: Kovno with its loneliness and its ballad atmosphere, its Baltic gloom and the surging movement of its river life. (The boatmen, singing aboard their rafts on the Niemen, reminded him of the pirates in The Corsair!)³³ He began to drench himself in German balladry.

For the first time Mickiewicz was able to read the balladry of the north in the original. He had begun during the summer of 1819, while he was vacationing in the country homes of various friends in Nowogródek region, to teach himself German, and by the time he was settled in Kovno was able to get along in it slowly with the aid of a dictionary (a “fatal” one, he complained to his friends).³⁴ Soon Schiller became his “only reading and the pleasantest.”³⁵ He worked his way greedily and triumphantly through The Robbers, Don Carlos, and many of Schiller's ballads, stopping sometimes to make a Polish translation of a portion that struck him with especial delight. He read, at the same time, a number of Goethe's ballads, notably Der Fischer, the poem which was to become one of the ancestors of his own “Świtezianka” “The Spirit of Lake Świteż.”

Mickiewicz left Kovno during the academic year 1821-1822 in order to go on with graduate work in Wilno, and during this time he helped his friend Edward Odyniec with a translation of Bürger's famous ballad Der wilde Jäger. When Odyniec' translation appeared in the Wilno Daily,³⁶ it was Mickiewicz who introduced it with a flattering foreword on Bürger. The ballad itself, which everyone in Poland was talking about, thanks to the début of von Weber's Freischütz at the new Schauspielhaus in Berlin on the anniversary of Waterloo the preceding summer (1821), left powerful traces in all Mickiewicz's subsequent Kovno writings. It had an immediate effect on the ballad which he and Odyniec wrote together about the same time as they were translating Der wilde Jäger. This is the ballad of “The Young Lord and the Maiden” “Panicz i dziewczyna”, a little known work which, though lacking in force, employs the alternate conversation and narrative technique of the best German ballads. The influence of Der wilde Jäger is seen at its most intense in the spectre of the Black Huntsman in Dziady, I and in the ghost of the cruel lord in Dziady, II.

Mickiewicz's acquaintance with nothern balladry was not confined to German specimens. He knew also Scott's Lady of the Lake,³⁷ having seen a French translation of part of it in the Geneva Bibliothèque universelle while he was still active in the Filomatian literary sessions in Wilno. This he admired for its ballad elements: its “grimness and horror,” its “terrifying and savage emotions,” the wild aspect of Alan Bane, the carrying of the “bloody cross,” the burial of Duncan, the lament of the captive woman, the singing of Ellen.³⁸

Mickiewicz knew Shakespeare's balladry as well, and he, like Bürger, who introduced his Lenora to the Hainbund with the lines from Hamlet, “I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word will harrow up your souls, freeze your young blood … etc.”³⁹ introduced his own most significant ballad to the world with other lines from the same drama, “Methinks I see. … Where? … In my mind's eyes.”⁴⁰

Northern balladry did two things for Mickiewicz. It gave him, in the first place, the courage to pioneer in using native materials in an unspoiled manner. Kazimierz Brodzinski had advocated the use of folk materials in poetry before Mickiewicz ever wrote a line, and so had Mickiewicz's own teacher, Leon Borowski, a disciple of Herder. Brodziński had used folk materials himself in his own pastoral Wiesław. But he had artificialized his characters and stylized his theme to such an extent that the result was more Theocritan than Polish. Mickiewicz learned from northern balladry to retell the village songs as nearly as possible in the idiom which brought them to his own ears and to leave out none of the sprites and demons of the folk mythology.

Northern balladry helped Mickiewicz, in the second place, to find himself, and through this to make his unique contribution to Polish literature.

Mickiewicz must have been, as a child, a well-balanced individual. He loved activity and contemplation equally, if we may judge from his own testimony in Dziady IV. Martial games and sports of every kind fascinated him. At the same time he liked to wander off alone, “to meet Homer” in some quiet grove, to “have converse with Tasso,” or “behold King John victorious at Vienna.”⁴¹

If fate had granted Mickiewicz a normally pleasant life, and above all a homeland with a normal history, he might have continued to find outward reality and the inner life equally satisfying. But fate dealt him, at the end of his student days, two stunning blows: one, the loss of his sweetheart Maryla, the other a sharp and menacing curtailment of opportunity for self-improvement through denial of a chance to study abroad.

Reality grew painful as the dual shock overtook him and Mickiewicz fled reality, to find satisfaction only in the inner life. Instinctively he turned from the classics, which absorbed him at first in Kovno, to northern balladry, and here he found a mood to match his own. The spirit world became his home. The inner life, “surging toward its own freedom, stimulated but not controlled or bounded by reality”⁴² became his whole life, and he—the perfect exponent of the romantic attitude.

Once he had discovered a world in which he could be free himself, Mickiewicz invited all youth to share it with him, as we have seen in the Ode to Youth. He went further. He decided that for himself the principle of Feeling, which rules the spirit world, was infinitely more to be trusted and infinitely more dynamic and creative than Reason, which rules the world of actuality. This became the cornerstone of his faith.

When the time came that Mickiewicz was ready to phrase this faith, he did it in a ballad. He called the ballad, appropriately, “romanticism.”

In this Mickiewicz draws the picture of a distracted country-girl, whose prototype might be anyone from a maid of Nowogródek to Lenora or Ophelia, in the act of describing to a crowd of people the vision she has had of her dead lover. The people, full of sympathy, see the ghost themselves, through the maiden's eyes. Then an old, bespectacled Professor appears. He is cold to the girl's tears and calls her vision the fever of an unbalanced imagination. But a young man objects to allowing the Professor's cold judgment to be final: “You are wrong,” he says. “The maid is right. She knows through feeling, and the crowd knows too, through feeling and believing deeply. These two principles, feeling and faith, convince me as neither the eyes nor spectacles of sages do: You may know truths about inanimate things, truths we ordinary folk know nothing of. In that realm you willingly accept the miraculous: you see a universe in just a grain of sand or in a single ray of light. But you are ignorant of the truths about living beings. In this realm you deny the miraculous! How wrong you are you will yourself discover if once you take a human heart and search it deeply as you search the secrets of the physical world.”

“romanticism” proved to have two-fold significance. It was a milestone in Mickiewicz's personal life and in the history of Polish literature. Mickiewicz had found a faith adequate to his need and in the strength of it was ready to lead the movement that would naturalize the romantic spirit in Poland.

Many forces had moulded Mickiewicz along the way that led to the ballad “romanticism,” but none for a longer time or more cogently than the spirit and example of northern balladry.

Notes

1. Pan Tadeusz, I, lines 467-469.

2. Polski Słownik Biograficzny, IV, 227.

3. Manorhouse.

4. Beet soup. For an account of the behavior of these refugees, see, Memoirs of the Countess Potocka (New York, 1900), pp. 12-13.

5. Korespondencja Filomatów, V, 241-243, quoted by Stanisław Wasylewski, “Drobiazgi Mickiewiczowskie,” Wiadomości literackie, 1925, No. 3.

6. Clinging to the custom of wearing the old Polish dress, especially the kontusz.

7. When the son asks the father if he does not see the Erlking's daughters, he says, “Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau.”

8. A theme used by Mickiewicz in Switezianka.

9. A theme used by Mickiewicz in “To lubię!”

10. A theme used by Mickiewicz in Świtez.

11. A theme used by Mickiewicz in Dziady, II.

12. Piotr Chmielowski, Adam Mickiewicz: zarys biograficzno-literacki (Warsaw, 1901) p. 23.

13. Ibid., p. 24.

14. Jan St. Bystroń, Literaci i Grafomani (Warsaw, 1938), p. 8.

15. Ibid., p. 22.

16. Letter of Mickiewicz to Czeczot, Apr. 23, 1823.

17. Letter of Mickiewicz to Niemcewicz, Moscow, Nov. 11 (22), 1827.

18. Or Mickiewicz may have encountered this theme first in W. Chłędowski's Polish reworking of Joseph Ratschky's German ballad about Nicholas and Margaret. Chłędowski's version was entitled Wyrok Bolesława (Bolesław's Verdict) and it appeared in Pamiętnik lwowski, Dec. 1818, pp. 267-275. Czeczot used this as the basis of a one-act operetta, Małgorzata z Zębocin, which Mickiewicz reviewed for the Filomatians, Dec. 29, 1819.

19. “Die alten Formen stürzen ein!”

20. Konstanty Gaszyński, in the preface to Kontuszowe pogadanki, Pisma prozaiczne (Leipzig, 1874), pp. 68-69.

21. Franciszek Rawita Gawroński, Zoryan Dołęga Chodakowski [pseudonym of Czarnocki]: jego życie i praca (Lwów, 1898), p. 28.

22. Leo Kobiliński-Ellis, W. A. Joukowski, seine Persönlichkeit, sein Leben, und sein Werk (Paderborn, 1933), p. 85.

23. “O Bürgerze,” Pisma Adama Mickiewicza, ed. Kallenbach, I, p. 132.

24. Here we are following the dating of Chmielowski, which we believe is correct.

25. Leo Kobiliński-Ellis, op. cit. (Note 22), p. 85.

26. Olga appeared in Syn Otečestva, 1816, No. XXIV, pp. 186-192; the article by Gnedich in the same journal, XXVII, 31, p. 3, and the one by Griboyedov, XXX, 81, p. 150.

27. Adolf von Strodtmann, Briefe von und an Gottfried A. Bürger (Berlin, 1874), I, 167.

28. In the footnote to “Ucieczka,” Pisma, op. cit. (Note 23) IV, p. 16.

29. A. von Strodtmann, op. cit. (Note 27), p. 164.

30. Ovid, Tristiae, Book IV, I, a poem which Mickiewicz himself translated.

31. A light-headed young lord.

32. “Do przyjaciół,” Pisma, op. cit. (Note 27), I, 127.

33. Letter of Mickiewicz to J. Jeżowski, 8 April, 1820.

34. Letter of Mickiewicz to Jan Czeczot, end of November, 1819.

35. Letter of Mickiewicz to J. Jeżowski, June, 1820.

36. Dziennik wileński, 1822, 471.

37. Bibliothèque universelle, Vol. VIII, contained Canto I, but we can not be certain Mickiewicz saw either this or Canto II, which appeared in the same volume but later in the year. We know, however, that he saw Cantos III and IV (Vol. VIII, pp. 409-428) for he reviewed them for the Filomatians, Dec. 27, 1818, and Feb. 4, 1819.

38. Nieznane pisma Adama Mickiewicza, ed. Kallenbach (Cracow, 1910), p. 126.

39. Adolf von Strodtmann, op. cit. (Note 27), p. 132. Bürger altered the passage from Hamlet slightly to suit his own purposes, as Mickiewicz did the one he used.

40. Caption to “Romantyczność,” Pisma, op. cit., I, 107.

41. Dziady, IV, Pisma, op. cit., II, 71.

42. Lascelles Abercrombie, romanticism (London, 1926), p. 129.