I. FLIRTATION AND FRAGMENTS

Conquer and describe.

Napoleon

Of his entire oeuvre, a single poem—although one not commonly anthologized, nor adequately interpreted—best represents Mickiewicz's concept of domesticity. The poem, entitled “Na pokoj grecki w domu księżnej Zeneidy Wołkońskiej w Moskwie” (“On the Grecian Room in Princess Zeneida Volkonskaia'a House in Moscow”),¹ offers a description of the actual interior of his friend's residence. I intend to place the poet's evocation of Volkonskaia's home-museum and his aesthetic experience within the intimate space of her abode, intricately connected with his striving for intimacy with her, within home studies. This type of discourse allows for a revelation of the poem's specifics, which originate in the practice of depicting newly renovated interiors. The poem's ekphrastic focus brings it back to the neoclassical tradition inherent in 18th-century panegyrical odes dedicated to the chambers in Warsaw's Royal Castle. The veritable wave of such poems was prompted by king Stanislaw August's ambitious project of renovating the Castle. Adam Naruszewicz in his “On the Marble Chamber,”² Jan Paweł Woronicz in his “Poem on the New Rooms in the Royal Castle”, Zubowski, and others praised the new look of the Castle's interiors that stirred their patriotic feelings and gave a different direction to the Polish ekphrastic practice, which had grown rather stale by the end of the 19th century.³

There exists, however, a closer intertext to Mickiewicz's poem. In a private letter written approximately the same time as Mickiewicz's “Na pokoj grecki,” Franciszek Malewski gives an enthusiastic account of Princess Volkonskaia's Moscow apartment on Tverskaia Street, in which he praises her superb skills at interior decorating. On November 10th, 1827, Malewski, who was a friend of Mickiewicz, provides for his family the following tour in words: “I do not know whether I already wrote that she (Volkonskaia) redecorated her rooms, and that these rooms were painted anew. Where there were red velvets, now there are green, where there were green, now there are blue; hence novelties are everywhere. On top of this, she added une chambre grecque, lit by an Etruscan lamp; beside all this, resting on pedestals, are statues, figurines, and all sorts of ancient paraphernalia. Behind this chambre is a moderne one, draped with white muslins and painted wondrously; in it is a dresser, a huge mirror overhung with miniatures, small tables with diadems, bracelets, pearl and diamond combs, etc. In the corner there is an enclosure with pictures proper to the Russian rite. It would be worthwhile to describe all of this in more detail for it is so beautiful, tasteful, and surprisingly done without exaggeration so that one's eye is transfixed. One sees richness, but not etalage. And how much talk! How much jealousy! It is a complete triumph! And how warm it is there! Indeed, it is warmer by the stairs in her abode than it is by the stove at my lodgings.” (Danilewiczowa 16-17).

Malewski's letter, informative but pedestrian, serves as a useful foil to Mickiewicz's poem. In sum, Malewski's intent is focused on the interior's face-lift, the minutiae of its design, its tasteful decorative furnishings and expensive trappings. Through sharing this societal news with his family, he gives a basic inventory of things and renders an idea of Volkonskaia's sense of artistic design, thus providing an insightful, albeit indirect, portrait of its tenant. Her household space is a display of luxury and feminine vanitas (jewelry, mirrors) where novelties and antiques are juxtaposed to sacred images. It suggests an affluent and fashionable woman who knows how to cherish the pleasures of material possession, and yet despite her worldiness remains devoutly religious.⁴

Malewski also attempts to portray Volkonskaia's home as her artistic project, a notion quite popular during the romantic era. In fact, Victor Hugo, Walter Scott, and Honore de Balzac lived in houses that offered clues to the owners' artistic natures and, moreover, that were entirely their own artistic creations. “We speak of the keeping of a room as we would of the keeping of a picture,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in his essay “Philosophy of Furniture,” “for both the picture and the room are amenable to those undeviating principles which regulate all varieties of art; and very nearly the same laws by which we decide on the higher merits of a painting, suffice for decision on the adjustment of a chamber” (10-11). To be sure, very few romantics possessed the means to practice this ultimate form of aestheticism. Poe, a poet who struggled daily to make a living, was never sufficiently solvent to act on his ideas, yet his material circumstances did not hinder him from envisioning in words an ideal environment.

Needless to say, the economic dimension of Volkonskaia's domestic space strongly affects Malewski's report. For him, the visual delight that the princess' house offers is curiously combined with another sensual joy—the surplus of heat, the most desirable kind of comfort in a northern European city in winter. This rather petty consideration reveals not only Malewski's practicality but also the financial difference between him and his hostess; her economic freedom undoubtedly facilitates the fact that her newly refurbished apartment could become a materialized aesthetic dream. Indeed, for Malewski it represents an abode so perfect in its accomplishment of aesthetic aims that it demands to be immortalized in words. In his compulsion to describe the Princess' Moscow apartment, perhaps he is also aware of how fragile homes and their interior designs are as a cultural phenomenon.

Although the accoutrements displayed in the Grecian Room that Princess Volkonskaia created were at that time quite fashionable, the elitist tradition as cited in Malewski's account was quite old. It should be noted that the practice of appropriating Greek treasures did not begin with the famous Lord Elgin and English dilletanti, but goes back as far as the ancient Roman habit of collecting and exhibiting Greek sculpture.⁵ Nineteenth-century European high society had revived ancient and Renaissance aesthetic trends by collecting mainly those objects that were easily transportable. These Greek, Roman and Egyptian “rooms” were a widespread cultural phenomenon that followed a prescribed pattern: a combination of museum and home, a tasteful arrangement of ancient artworks within a domestic interior. This tendency was perhaps expressed best by Sir John Soane's sumptuous design of his own home-museum in London. Thus, despite Malewski's laudatory comments, the originality of Volkonskaia's creation was rather limited and stemmed from a fairly well-known practice.

Mickiewicz's approach to the same subject contrasts markedly to his friend's. Avoiding a purely descriptive inventory, the poet bases his much underrated poem⁶ about Volkonskaia's room on a completely different artistic principle. He mentions only the various artifacts and statuary owned by Volkonskaia, while the practice of portraying “new rooms” through enumeration, description, and laudation is questioned and eventually transcended by him. The contents of the interior are rendered subservient to his own “transfiguring perceptual imagination”⁷ through whose power he transforms the phenomenal aspects of the Grecian room into a sublime vision.

As a starting point, the laudatory description of the newly renovated interior functions in intricate configuration with many other aspects of the poem, such as spatial design, visual communication, motion, amorous behavior, fragmentariness, and the romantic need to escape from all earthly concerns. Yet its purpose for Mickiewicz's project remains effective because it points to his poem's origin in real life experience. The “experiential beginning” (Vendler 592) of “Na pokoj grecki,” though mainly visible because of the poem's formulaic title, can be traced in its evocation of an interior from the point of view of someone walking through it. The room reveals itself while the visitor is absorbing its space with his eyes. Spatial representation is measured by the stride of someone who does not belong to the place, of someone who just arrived and might leave soon. Such outsideness is indicated in “Na pokoj grecki” with a sure sense of economy: the very fact that the guest has to be guided implies his unfamiliarity with the dwelling he has just stepped into. Later on, his image as an outsider is reinforced by “podróżna noga” (“traveller's leg”), a pars pro toto image of the wandering poet. By uttering “I entered” (“wszedłem), he indicates not only his passage over the threshold, but quite consciously his departure from the modern world of the 19th century and re-emergence into the realm of ancient history.

These seemingly temporal rites of passage are structured first according to the poetics of surprise. In utter confusion, or as an exaggerated compliment, the guest perceives the chamber first as the underworld, then as a model of the whole city of Herculaneum. At this liminal point, the extent of his astonishment is expressed in questions that suggest the transformation of the relatively small enclosure of the room into the vast caverns of Hades and the excavated ruins of Herculaneum. Thus, in one sweeping gesture he presents the interior as an exterior:

Wszedłem—czy to kraina za Lety potokiem,
Czy miast wielka mumija, zwłoki Herkulanu?
I have entered—is this the land beyond the River of Lethe,
Or a huge mummy of cities, the corpse of Herculaneum?

While the magnitude of this inversion indicates the overwhelming impression made on the poet, its funereal associations render the compliment paid to Volkonskaia rather clumsy. The comparison of the newly restored place to the ruins of an ancient city serves Mickiewicz as a starting point for questioning the practice of laudatory ekphrasis. During this process, the Russian princess' lapidarium becomes a “whole world” of antiquity. Its “wholeness” is also of a peculiar nature; it is a world restored to completion, but not resurrected. Its entirety is comprised of parts that were put together, but lack the original spirituality:

Nie! tu cały świat dawny na piękności
słowo
Odbudował się, chociaż nie ożył na nowo,
Z mozaiki świat cały! każdy jego szczątek
Jest odłamem dzieł sztuki, wielkości pamiątek.
No! through the word of beauty the whole ancient world
Is rebuilt here, but not revived anew,
From a mosaic the whole world! its every piece
Is a fragment of artworks, of the greatness of monuments.

As an inference from the title, the reader is prepared to see a room arranged à la mode Grecque; such a choice of artifacts, if taken from the Hellenistic period, would be characteristic of the romantic mode.⁸ However, the Greek room's embellishments are more mixed, including artworks of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman origin. Such an evocation of the whole of antiquity may refer to the princess' syncretic ideals, or may be another means of emphasizing the totality of the rebuilt past, therefore indicating a different authorial project.

The first detailed example of ekphrasis can be found in a bas-relief portraying an angry, but somewhat cowed god whose likeness had been removed from its original setting and put on the floor.

Z kamienia płaskorzeźbą wygląda twarz
boga,
Gniewny zda się swojego pohańbienia wstydzić,
Depcących dawną wiarę ludzi nienawidzić,
I na powrót w marmuru ukrywa się łonie,
Skąd przed wieki snycerskie wyrwały go dłonie.
From the stone looks a god's bas-relief visage,
Angry (he) seems to be ashamed of his disgrace,
(He seems) to hate the people trampling this old faith,
And back in the marble's womb (he) hides,
Whence ages ago a carver's hands pulled him out.

This unusual manner of display contributes to the god's deep sense of humiliation. His face, contorted in fury and turned away in embarrassment, represents a topos of sculpture in motion. Sculpture—usually a depiction of a moment frozen in time—is brought back to life. The tension of the ekphrasis, therefore, lies in the opposing concepts of rest and motion. Curiously characterized as a gesture going back into the “womb of the marble,” the sculpted god's backward motion is directed at the moment of his own birth.⁹ His anger is reminiscent of another image—that of Moses, the smasher of idols. But the Greek idol's abject anger is bereft of followers, since all the other broken gods scattered in the princess' room are passively asleep.

Mickiewicz's description consistently anthropomorphizes the ruined statuary, by which he emphasizes its displacement and demise. For instance, in the case of one sculpture, the capital separated from the shaft of its column is likened to a head severed from its body:

Gdzieniegdzie ścięta głowa nieznanej kolumny,
Skaleczona, odarta, podeptana w pyle,
Wala się jako trupia czaszka na mogile.
Here and there a beheaded column's capital,
Injured, flayed, and trampled in dust,
Is scattered as if a skull on the grave.

Another work described in the poem, an Egyptian obelisk, compared to a stranger (“przychodzień”) so old that he can hardly stand on his legs, created a small controversy. With an exacting eye, the classical scholar Sinko stated that Egyptian obelisks, because of their size, could not be exhibited in apartments (295). Evidently, not only did he overlook the fact that the size of ancient obelisks considerably vary, but more importantly, that Mickiewicz imaginatively reworked the “raw” material of the Greek room. Beginning with the first stanza, the Greek room is transformed into the open space of Hades and Herculaneum, which could certainly accommodate any monumental Egyptian obelisk.

At this point the text's descriptive stratagem allows for a completely different conceptual possibility. All the artifacts in the princess' room are isolated from each other and scattered about; the capital of a column lies neglected “in dust” (“w pyle”), while an ancient piece of jewelry is “abandoned in sand” (“zaniedbany w piasku”). In Mickiewicz's treatment of the scene, it seems altogether natural to see the shiny ebony floor (“szyby hebanu”) in the princess' newly renovated apartment inexplicably covered with dust and sand. This interior may remind the reader of the desert depicted by Percy Bysse Shelley in his poem “Ozymandias of Egypt,” in which he evoked the sculpted visage of a king decaying in the desert. Thus, the room designed as an oasis of art becomes a deserted cemetery that further metamorphoses into a synecdoche of the whole world. No walls can protect its contents from destruction. In this realm ancient culture can exist only in a state of diaspora: displaced and neglected, it is a world permeated by a sense of loss. This highly aesthetic and orderly interior filled with precious holdings—like all other Greek rooms of that period—has been transfigured by the poet's imagination into a vision of decay and impermanence.

Up to this point, Mickiewicz consistently plays with the panegyrical tradition. Otherwise, it would be a strange kind of praise on Mickiewicz's part to honor his friend's patronage of the arts of the past. Volkonskaia's chamber-world does not inspire the poet to offer a panegyric or eulogy, but rather elicits an elegiac critique of the very civilization that caused much of the ruin of that ancient world and which tolerates the fragmentation of past cultures. The mutilated bodies of once sacred works of art reflect history and transitoriness; they are changed, and with these changes their essence is obliterated. Ontologically speaking, in the poet's view, Princess Volkonskaia's collection of ancient bas-reliefs, obelisks, columns and altars belongs to the vast body of artwork in diaspora. The poem particularly emphasizes this status of artifacts removed from their original setting. Such a vision creates in the poem a primary split between its point of departure and result, that is between the presentation of the princess' Greek room as a temple of art and the poet's historical critique of it; in this respect the Greek room's function is a mere pretext used by the poet to present his own analysis of the way 19th-century culture treated the past. It is clear that for him the Greek chamber-world is not a place where monuments of past grandeur (once considered the artistic and sacred ideal) are fully venerated. Volkonskaia's project, albeit noble, only mimics the past. For this reason Mickiewicz has the once-venerated god turn his head away from the mockery of her Greek chamber.

Amidst the damaged ancient statuary a bronze urn rests on a sacrificial altar to Saturn. Significantly, these two objects represent the only complete artworks on display, and as such they seem to indicate a different approach. However, the burning flame in the urn identifies Saturn, the god of abundance and prosperity, as the sole surviving worshipped entity here. Thereby the Greek room is turned into a temple where a privileged class venerates such values. Through this image yet another step is taken towards the final departure from the practice of laudatory description of newly refurbished rooms.

In the Grecian room, portrayed as a temple of prosperity, the spiritual value of ancient rituals is destined to further decline. In an attempt to revive them, the poet turns to the depreciated ritual of love that was considered sacred by ancient man. The opportunity to do so arrives quickly. Amidst the ancient statues of gods there is one which can be awakened and made active. Eros, the god of love and the son of Aphrodite, “najmniejszy z bogów dotąd uczczony od ludzi” (“The smallest of gods so far worshipped by man”), emerges from the urn's flame. To pass this god by without a sacrificial offering would be a sin, and the visiting poet uses this argument to persuade his guide to worship Eros. However, his clever plan of bringing back an ancient sacred ceremonial and combining it with an amorous scheme involving the princess is all in vain.¹⁰ Regardless of the result of his reviving this erotic sacred ritual, his project betrays a certain, perhaps subconscious, ambivalence. It is unclear to what extent the poet is truly seeking a spiritual experience and to what extent he is interested in intimacy with his hostess.

In Princess Volkonskaia's Grecian room the visual communication between the guest and his hostess is not frequent, but meaningful in its implications. As if in a sacra conversazione, their silent interaction is transmitted by minimal gestures and telling furtive gazes. From the first line—“Skroś ciemnoty wiedziony jej gwiazdzistym wzrokiem” (“Through the darkness [I was] guided by her starry gaze”)—visual interaction is the only means of maneuvering in the darkness. Later, the guide's gaze changes abruptly when her guest's amorous behavior and erotic longing, despite his restraint, become apparent. No words are spoken, only with her “cold” eye does she thwart his gaze:

Niestety! przewodniczka chłodnym rzutem oka
Jak laską Merkurego uderza z wysoka.
Alas! the guide with her cold gaze
Strikes me from above as if with Mercury's staff.

Thus, the visual exchange between the unconquerable Russian cicerone and her ardent guest comes to an anti-climactic end. The interruption of aesthetic meditation and erotic dream means that the guest is destined only to describe but not to conquer. His service to her is only that of a friend and a “court poet,” but not of a lover. The unrealized encounter even further contributes to the fragmentariness and “spiritless” quality of the Grecian room.

In Malewski's portrayal of the princess' apartment, beauty and piety are combined with a warm feminine aura and a surplus of heat. In Mickiewicz's depiction, the beautiful hostess' starry eyes illuminate the dark interior, but do not provide any warmth. Indeed, they function as all stars do. The hostess' cold gaze creates a distance between her and her guest, and has a chilling effect that serves to de-domesticate the interior.

II. HALF-AND-HALF

“Na pokoj grecki” does not only explore various levels of fragmentariness and completeness as pertaining to the status of the princess' holdings. Through the theme of wholeness and halfness the poet also builds up another dimension that has implications about human relationships.

Wholeness and halfness dominate the beginning and the end of the poem, where words connoting fragments such as “odłam” (“fraction”) and “szczątek” (“remnant”) are stressed. Thematic incompleteness seems to imply here the meta-poetics of fragmentation, though there is no textual proof that the genre of the poem was conceived in terms of a deliberate romantic fragment. At this stage of his poetic development, Mickiewicz was still bound by the neo-classical poetics that accepted and even favored complete form. The notion of a true, intentional fragment he approved only in his Forefathers' Eve and perfected in his last poems written in the 1840's in Lausanne.

The wholeness of an object implies that nothing is missing or ignored. Wholeness also suggests the total cohesion of an object that is intact or unbroken. Wholeness in the context of Mickiewicz's poem can be contrasted to halfness:

Nie! tu cały świat dawny na piękności
słowo
Odbudował się, chociaż nie ożył na nowo.
Z mozaiki świat cały!
No! through the word of beauty the whole ancient world
Is rebuilt here, but not revived anew,
From a mosaic the whole world!

The wholeness asserted in the first strophe of the poem is quite ambiguous. It is not an original or primal whole, but an entirety artificially arranged from diverse parts. Moreover, the totality of the wholeness, though impressive, is but an artistic construct and therefore lacks the life of spirit. In fact, to qualify it the poet uses a mosaic, a genre taken from the visual arts. In establishing the Greek room in its totality he employs repetition. “The whole world” (“cały świat”) appears at the beginning of the first sentence, and then at the end of the second sentence, right before the caesura. Mickiewicz's use of anadiplosis, as shown here, is not an exact repetition, but is rather a subtle rearrangement of constant elements—the trope that, like a mirror, repeats a reverse image. Hence “świat cały” becomes “cały świat.”

Like the first stanza, the final one is also informed by refined repetitions:

Cóż opowiem wrócony do śmiertelnych
kraju?
Ach, opowiem że byłem w pól drogi do raju,
Z duszą na poły tęskną, na poły radosną,
Słyszałem już tę rajską rozmowę-wpółgłosśną,
I widzialem te rajskie pół światła, pół
cienia,
I doznałem niestety! tylko pół zbawienia!
What shall I tell returning to the world of mortals?
O, I shall tell that I was half way to paradise,
With my soul half longing, half joyful,
I heard already that paradisiacal conversation half-whispered,
And I saw those paradisiacal half-lights, half shadows,
And I experienced—alas! only half of salvation!

This time the recurrent words “pół,” “poły,” and “połowa” appear with the regularity of an isocolon. The frequency of these words alternates: one in the first verse, two in the second, again one in the third, two in the penultimate verse, and one in the final verse. Like in a mantra, the powerful unifying effect of these repetitions paradoxically intensifies the sense of incompletion, or of less than a whole.

Both the first and the last stanzas are contrasting forces that embrace the poet's vision and intimations of intimacy with his hostess. Their “wholes” and “halves” frame his cognitive process and the emotional striving that Coleridge summarized as a poetic longing for the absolute spiritual Union. Yet these wholes and halves constitute a chasm that cannot be reconciled.

The incompleteness of the ancient artworks permeates the atmosphere in the Grecian room and presents a powerful determinant projected on the unfulfilled intimacy between the hostess and her guest. The unrequited erotic attraction evoked in the strongly emphasized neo-classical aura brings to mind an English intertext. Mickiewicz's poem belongs to the same tributary of romantic images inspired by Greek art as John Keats' famous “Ode On a Grecian Urn.” Set on an antiquated stage, the amorous interplay between a wandering poet and his nymph corresponds to the sculpted image of a “fair youth” and her “bold Lover” in the English poem. In Keats' rendering the eternal attraction of both lovers cannot be fulfilled due to the fact that they exist within an artwork. Caught in the design (albeit ideal) to which they are consigned, they are unable to transcend the limitations of the material, of the artificial, and of the artistic. The line in Keats' poem, “Never, never canst thou kiss,”¹¹ coincides in its anti-climactic solution with the ending of the erotic interplay in the text written by the Polish author. Yet for the latter, the romantic dreamer returns to life as half a man and lover, but wholly a poet.

The leap from thematizing incompleteness and fragmentariness to using them in terms of a genre does not take place in this poem. If one would concur, however, with Levinson's notion of an unintentional fragment as informed by textual irresolution,¹² then the penultimate stanza allows such speculation. One of its sentences, “O piękna nimfo! Bądźmy nabożni oboje?” (“O beautiful nymph! Let us be pious?”), which cleverly suggests amorous interaction to the Russian nymph, presents an unsolvable textual problem. The insertion of the question mark in the imperative sentence, where both logic and Polish grammar require an exclamation point, breaks the flow of the poem and has a slightly disorienting effect. This lack of a clear textual solution caused Mickiewicz's editors some problems. The line, according to Czeslaw Zgorzelski, could have read “O piękna nimfo! Bądźmy nabożni—oboje?”¹³ On the one hand inserting a dash in this line accentuates a certain polite hesitation and, ultimately, causes a difference in meaning. On the other, it is a far-reaching editorial imposition, especially in the case of the manuscript, which underwent substantial revisions by the poet. As it stands, the imperative sentence ending with a question mark represents the single textual incongruity in “Na pokoj grecki.”

To summarize, through the statuary's having fallen into destruction, “Na pokoj grecki” creates a thematic, metaphysical and historical incompleteness. The poet's erotic longing, so abruptly stifled, causes an interruption in the flow of the poem and contributes to its conflictual pattern. One intrinsic textual incongruity appears along with a highly sophisticated system of repetitions, regular stanzaic structure, and innovative personifications. As a result, the poem emerges as an equivocal work. Not a true, intentional fragment, but only verging on incompleteness, this not entirely polished piece may be qualified as a fragmentum formosum, a shapely fragment, a product which in its final form was accepted as such by its author, but through its discrepancies radiates an uncontrolled energy.

III. AUTHENTIC ABODE

Mickiewicz's “Na pokoj grecki” is strongly determined by two forms of representation of art—that is, of what is in the Grecian Room and what is not there. For Thomas McFarland the first type belongs to the mimetic mode, while the second type is ascribed to the meontic mode. Though ontologically opposite, they may coexist like positive and negative photographic images: “The mimetic and meontic modes, though contrasted, can intermingle in the work of a single practitioner, and indeed in a single artifact: for as methods of artistic activity, they form a continuum rather than an absolute opposition” (3). For example, in Mickiewicz's “Na pokoj grecki” the sculptures through their concrete remains and, at the same time, fragmentation are related to both the mimetic and meontic mode.

Essential for the meontic mode is the objectivity of absence, of a negated presence that cannot be perceived by the senses. Since the meontic stands for an awareness of something incomplete, in Mickiewicz's “Na pokoj grecki” it is implied by the chain of significations formed by the ruined sculptures, the lack of both erotic and domestic intimacies, and the absence of a spiritual dimension. But in the meontic there also exists the possibility of redemption of lost wholeness. In this respect, only regaining the former perfection of the sculptures or the poet's erotic fulfillment could create conditions for resurrection. The fate of the sculpture, thus, is already determined by the poetic self who concentrates only on his Platonic escape from reality:

O niech te wszystkie bóstwa nad pamiątek ziemią,
Wiecznie snem marmurowym i bronzowym drzemią!
O let all these idols over the earth of memories
In a sleep of marble and bronze doze eternally!

The impassioned poet's longing is thwarted by the indifferent “beautiful nymph.” His desire for a paradisiacal reality ends in disappointment and failure. Actually, it is the last stanza that reveals the paradisiacal, Platonic nature of the poet's yearning for erotic fulfillment. Experienced here are glimpses of an unattainable paradise, which Plato envisioned in Phaedrus as a place “beyond heaven” desired by two lovers. For the romantic Wordsworth the longing for paradise was precisely the yearning for “God, who is our home” (281). Such a paradise—the home of true happiness, of human origin and destiny—is located not in reality but in the transcendental world and thus remains totally inaccessible. For the Russian princess' wandering guest it represents only a promise of homecoming. He feels that he is an incomplete human being and thus again mirrors the desolation and scattering of his immediate surroundings.

IV. DOMESTICATING DEATH

Ja płynę dalej, wy idźcie do domu.

Mickiewicz, “Żeglarz”¹⁴

Despite its varied functions, the romantics understand the home as a definition of its inhabitant. This is not so in the case of Mickiewicz's “Na pokoj grecki,” for this interior, devoid of domestic tranquility and a sense of protection, defines only the guest, his worldview and his emotions. Mickiewicz “appropriates” Princess Volkonskaia's dwelling and treats it as if its wonders existed solely in his own imaginary space. In this private enclosure he feels free to mold the space and the objects it holds according to his own desires and critical vision. The Grecian room, perceived by Malewski as the princess' flattering portrait, represents in Mickiewicz's treatment an elitist culture in crisis. While Malewski with unsurpassed enthusiasm describes her home as inseparable from her collection, Mickiewicz—through a separation of this collection from spiritual life—proves that her collection is indeed a group of artifacts permeated by death. Therefore, Malewski rather than Mickiewicz preserves Volkonskaia's interior, for his faithful verbal rendering of her rooms and the objects that fill them offers today's reader a glimpse into the long vanished world of the household on Tverskaia Street. However, in terms of a broader cultural analysis, Mickiewicz's critique of restoring the past in museum-like homes anticipates postmodern criticism of taking native American sacred objects out of their natural context and displaying them for public view.

Mickiewicz's project of de-domesticating home, also present in his other poems written both in Russia and later in the West, shows his consistent probing of the seeming privacy of human abodes. His “poezja domowa,”¹⁵ in evoking either his own abode, his friends' homes, or imaginary dwellings, though kept to a minimum, borders on the extreme. In Forefathers' Eve the ruined home of Gustaw's childhood represents a space permeated by death and informs another excessive inversion of the notion of home traditionally conceived as the center of life. Pan Tadeusz evokes a gentry manor in Soplicowo, traditionally considered an archetypal Polish abode.¹⁶ However, the manor's representational ambiguities indicate that Mickiewicz continues to de-domesticate images of homes. The Soplica manor, though it presents a safe haven, provides little privacy; instead it functions merely as a place of shelter during a period of transition. The manor is bestowed with a strong aura of historical and familial memory, and yet to a certain degree may be consigned to oblivion. Although oneirically incomplete (for it is devoid of stairs, and, consequently, a cellar and an attic) it represents, at the same time, an ethereal place in which one's childhood fantasies might have lingered. To the manor's representational ambiguities one can add its centrifugal dynamics, since, unlike most Polish houses centered around the hearth, it lacks a fireplace. (In point of fact, the fireplace is not mentioned once in the text.) Instead the manor is itself a hearth, radiating energy to the outside world. Indeed, the white walls of the Soplica manor are unorthodoxically airy structures that open out onto their immediate surroundings, thus becoming a part of them, and thereby elevating these same environs to the status of a home. It has even been noted that the environment is more domestic then the manor itself.¹⁷ Mainly through this contrivance, the Soplicowo manor stands rather for one's homeland than home.¹⁸

If one concurs with the use of Gaston Bachelard's classical definition of the home as “protected intimacy,” then Mickiewicz's concept of domesticity evokes the opposite of this notion.

Notes

1. All quotations are based on the edition Wiersze 1825-1829. Dzieła wszystkie. The spelling of the word “pokoj” without a diacritic follows this critical edition. The abbreviated title and the page number are given in parenthesis. All translations—kept as literal as possible—if not stated otherwise are mine. I am grateful to Halina Filipowicz, Samuel Fiszman and Jadwiga Maurer for their comments regarding this article.

2. The poem's full title is as follows: “On the Marble Chamber Decorated by His Highness King Stanislaw August's Order with the Polish Kings' Portraits.”

3. In speaking of Mickiewicz's “Na pokoj grecki” in this tradition, Windakiewicz observes that as a concept the work is reminiscent of Naruszewicz's ode “On the Marble Chamber” (104). Another critic, Tadeusz Sinko, qualifies the poem's genre as ekphrasis (295). Finally, for Kleiner the poem combines a panegyric with an anacreontic (22). The generic project of the poem is, however, more complicated and truly romantic in its syncretic design, given its elements of the ode, panegyric, elegy, and ekphrasis.

4. In fact, all these characteristics of Volkonskaia as a young woman appeared also in other descriptions of hers penned by her contemporaries. Useful biographical information regarding Volkonskaia may be found in Gorodetzky, 93-105.

5. The most remarkable example of this is Emperor Vespasian's garden in his Villa in Tivoli.

6. Sinko, for example, considers “Na pokoj grecki” as nothing but “salonowy poemacik” (“a salon trifle”; 295).

7. This is Coleridge's term; see Coleridge, “Biographia Literaria,” 306. I am grateful to Devon C. Sanner for his suggestion concerning Coleridge's ideas about imagination.

8. For comments on romantic Hellenism see Levine's The Broken Column: A Study in romantic Hellenism and Stern's The Rise of romantic Hellenism in English Literature 1732-1786.

9. The idea of an ancient god seeking solace in the “womb of the marble” is exactly opposite to what Aristotle propounds; according to him, the idea of a finished statue is concealed inside the marble and a sculptor's creative goal is to reveal the statue from the material that bounds it.

10. While researching Princess Volkonskaia's papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, I found among her many drawings one that provides a close visual intertext to the scene represented by Mickiewicz in his “Na pokoj grecki”: a man and a woman set in an antiquated stage and wearing classical outfits are looking at each other, while Eros is acting as mediator.

11. On Keats' treatment of sculpture see Hirtz, “How Dreams Become Poems: Keats' Imagined Sculpture and Re-Vision of Epic” 301-314.

12. See also Greenleaf, Pushkin and the romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony; on Polish literary fragment see Kurska, Fragment romantyczny.

13. Zgorzelski, the prominent Mickiewicz scholar and editor, considers the possibility of Mickiewicz's committing a syntactical error; see his comments in Mickiewicz, Wiersze 1825-1829, in Dzieła wszystkie, 254. However, the long list of revisions made by Mickiewicz for the first edition of the poem excludes such possibility.

14. “I will swim further, you go home.”

15. This phrase is borrowed from Wyka, Poeta i sztukmistrz. Wyka argues that among Polish romantic poets, Norwid was the “poet of the domestic interior,” p. 89. It was Juliusz Słowacki, however, who in his correspondence created an archetypal image of the home of his dream and described in detail all the actual flats he lived in.

16. For the architectural tradition of the Soplicowo manor see Piwińska, “Staropolska ‘nauka budownicza’ w Panu Tadeuszu.”

17. See the expressions such as “domowa rzeka,” “domowe drzewa” (“the domestic river,” the domestic trees” or, in Mackenzie's rendition, “my homeland trees”; Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz 155).

18. Graczyk in her article “Szczęście Pana Tadeusza” also applies Bachelard's category of an oneiric abode to her analysis of the Soplica manor. She notices that “Ten dom nie zatrzymuje nas w środku, nie więzi, raczej wysyła ku światu, który jest ogrodem” (“This home does not keep us inside nor confines, but rather sends us to the world which is a garden”; 64).

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