Adam Mickiewicz was born on Christmas Eve in Nowogródek (or perhaps in Zaosie, a village near that town), in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His father was a small-town lawyer, a very typical representative of the petty gentry. The poet's mother, belonging to the same class, had been a servant girl at a neighboring manor before her marriage. The region, which had once been ethnically Lithuanian, now had a peasant population speaking Byelorussian, and the folklore that was to mark Mickiewicz so strongly was predominantly Byelorussian. The childhood and early adolescence of the future poet was permeated with the cordial, warm atmosphere of local Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic traditions. He went to a school in Nowogródek maintained by the Dominican Order. Its curriculum had been reformed according to the principles elaborated by the Commission for National Education and had been placed under the supervision of the University of Wilno. Mickiewicz was a mediocre pupil, but participated very actively in school games, theater performances, and “moot courts” organized to resemble old Polish tribunals. A gift for friendship and group life, so visible later on in his life, can be traced back to these high school years. He was fourteen when the Napoleonic army, in its expedition against Russia, entered Nowogródek and Napoleon's brother, Hieronymous, King of Naples, took up quarters in the family house. The echoes of that event, as well as the landscapes and human types of his native province, were, in his mature age, to become the material for Mickiewicz's epos in verse, Pan Tadeusz. In 1815, he entered the University of Wilno on a scholarship, studying first the sciences, then switching to literature. After graduation in 1819, he became a high-school teacher, fulfilling the terms of the scholarship, in the neighboring town of Kowno. His university years were among the happiest in his life, and he profited greatly, especially from his professor of classical philology, Groddeck, an eminent German scholar, and from his professor of literature, Borowski. His knowledge of Latin authors, which he brought from his high school and the university, was so thorough that it enabled him, later on, to lecture successfully as professor of Latin literature at the College of Lausanne in Switzerland. But his student's life was also a life of intense friendships and of participation in clandestine or semiclandestine groups, of which he was one of the most zealous organizers. One such group, the Philomaths, as they called themselves, had no avowed political goals. They gathered regularly to read and criticize each other's poems and papers on various subjects. But in fact, because of their close contact with the Freemasons, especially with one fervent Freemason, an ex-soldier of Kościuszko's army by the name of Kontrym (who was then a university librarian), the Philomaths tended to influence their colleagues in the progressive and patriotic spirit. For that purpose, they applied a model pattern of conspiracy, acting as a small, invisible lodge, creating and infiltrating larger student organizations, such as the Philareths. Much time was given to group excursions in the nearby wooded hills, to songs, and to humorous ceremonies, etc. In general, as their works and their correspondence show, Mickiewicz and his friends were joyous young men, full of a sense of humor and well deserving of the sobriquet “Sternians,” Laurence Sterne being one of their favorite authors.

Mickiewicz's first poems were imitations of Voltaire, written to amuse his friends. Like his model, he took relish in irreverent themes, for instance, in his adaptation of La Pucelle d'Orléans. As his master in classical Polish verse he looked, above all, to Stanisław Trembecki. From these early exercises he acquired a firm, classical discipline. His first poem to be published, “City Winter” (“Zima miejska,” 1818), is still an excellent example of a vigorous, classical poem. Its tone is half-humorous, its syntax Latinlike, studded with inversions; and already that manly concreteness of style, which is Mickiewicz's chief merit, is visible in this first sample.

Mickiewicz and his friends were, stylistically and spiritually, the direct descendants of the eighteenth century. They studied not only Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, but also such philosophers as Condillac and Helvetius. Mickiewicz's poem of 1820, not printed but circulated in handwritten copies, “Ode to Youth” (“Oda do młodości”), which was to become popular with the whole young generation, is a kind of Freemasonic song, calling man to push the “clod of the earth” onto new paths, to join forces in altruistic love, to storm the “citadel of Fame,” and to prepare for human freedom. In its style, the poem is marked by numerous references to classical mythology. It is curious to note that in the same year Mickiewicz wrote “A Hymn for the Ascension of the Holy Virgin,” and that coincidence seems to confirm the definition of romanticism as a politico-mystical current. Another poem of Mickiewicz's, “The Potato” (“Kartofla,” written 1819), deserves our attention, as it is a humorous picture of the discovery of America. Written in classical couplets, this is a story of how Columbus is stopped in the middle of the ocean by the Greek gods, who, having been driven out of Europe, are jealous of their new possessions on the American continent. The fate of Columbus' expedition, however, is decided in the Christian heaven. There, certain saints strongly oppose Columbus' progress because they foresee the slaughter of the Indians. Among those in favor of allowing the discovery of America is St. Dominic, shown in a very disagreeable light as the murderer of the Albigensians. But victory goes to St. Dominic when he holds up a potato in front of the saintly company and throws it on the balance: the blessings that the plant holds for hungry populations outweigh the tears of the Indians. St. Rafael adds a prophecy as to the future of America:

Then will a star of liberties shine over the new world,
Virtue and learning will gather under its rays;
The People of sovereign power will rule over equals, they
Will bend old-fashioned tyrants to their feet and kindle
New fires in Europe from the spark of Freedom.

The years spent by Mickiewicz as a schoolteacher in Kowno were rather grim, as he could visit his friends in Wilno but rarely; moreover, an unhappy love oppressed him. That love for Maryla Wereszczaka was to be a kind of romantic archetype in Polish literature thanks to Mickiewicz's fame. Maryla came from a well-to-do landowning family. Despite her emotional involvement, she refused to go as far as marrying a penniless schoolteacher, preferring instead a count. It seems that she regretted it later. In Kowno Mickiewicz gradually discovered Schiller, Goethe, and Byron and started to write ballads. The appearance of his first book of poems, Ballads and Romances (Ballady i romanse), in 1822 opened for good the era of romanticism in Poland. The preface to that volume was a manifesto of the new current, but the poems themselves spoke even more clearly:

“ROMANTYCZNOść”

Słuchaj, dzieweczko!
—Ona nie słucha—
To dzień biały! to miasteczko!
Przy tobie nie ma żywego ducha.
Co tam wkoło siebie chwytasz?
Kogo wołasz, z kim się witasz?
—Ona nie słucha.—
To jak martwa opoka
Nie zwróci w stronę oka,
To strzela wkoło oczyma,
To się łzami zaleje;
Coś niby chwyta, coś niby trzyma;
Rozpłacze się i zaśmieje.
“Tyżeś to w nocy? to ty, Jasieńku!
Ach! i po śmierci kocha!
Tutaj, tutaj, pomaleńku,
Czasem usłyszy macocha!
“Niech sobie słyszy, już nie ma ciebie!
Już po twoim pogrzebie!
Ty już umarłeś? Ach! ja się boję!
Czego się boję mego Jasieńka?
Ach, to on! lica twoje, oczki twoje!
Twoja biała sukienka!
“I sam ty biały jak chusta,
Zimny, jakie zimne dłonie!
Tutaj połóż, tu na łonie,
Przyciśnij mnie, do ust usta!
“Ach, jak tam zimno musi być w grobie!
Umarłeś! tak, dwa lata!
Weź mię, ja umrę przy tobie,
Nie lubię świata.
“Żle mnie w złych ludzi tłumie,
Płaczę, a oni szydzą;
Mówię, nikt nie rozumie;
Widzę, oni nie widzą!
“Śród dnia przyjdź kiedy …
To może we śnie?
Nie, nie … trzymam Ciebie w ręku
Gdzie znikasz, gdzie, mój Jasieńku!
Jeszcze wcześnie, jeszcze wcześnie!
“Mój Boże! kur się odzywa,
Zorza błyska w okienku.
Gdzie znikłeś! Ach! stój, Jasieńku!
Ja nieszczęśliwa.”
Tak się dziewczyna z kochankiem pieści,
Bieży za nim, krzyczy, pada;
Na ten upadek, na głos boleści
Skupia się ludzi gromada.
“Mówcie pacierze!—Krzyczy pros tota—
Tu jego dusza być musi.
Jasio być musi przy swej Karusi,
On ją kochał za żywota!”
I ja to słyszę, i ja tak wierzę,
Płaczę i mówię pacierze.
“Słuchaj, dzieweczko!”—Krzyknie śród
zgiełku
Starzec i na lud zawoła:
“Ufajcie memu oku i szkiełku,
Nic tu nie widzę dokoła.
“Duchy karczemnej tworem gawiedzi,
W głupstwa wywarzone kuźni.
Dziewczyna duby smalone bredzi,
A gmin rozumowi bluźni.”
“Dziewczyna czuje—odpowiadam skromnie—
A gawiedź wierzy głęboko;
Czucie i wiara silniej mówi do mnie
Niż mędrca szkiełko i oko.
“Martwe znasz prawdy, nieznane dla ludu,
Widzisz świat w proszku, w każdej gwiazd iskierce;
Nie znasz prawd żywych, nie obaczysz cudu!
Miej serce i patrzaj w serce!

(1821)

“THE ROMANTIC”

“Silly girl, listen!”
But she doesn't listen
While the village roofs glisten,
Bright in the sun.
“Silly girl, what do you do there,
As if there were someone to view there,
A face to gaze on and greet there,
When there is no one, none, do you hear!”
But she doesn't hear.
Like a dead stone
She stands there alone,
Staring ahead of her, peering around
For something that has to be found
Till, suddenly spying it,
She touches it, clutches it,
Laughing and crying.
Is it you, my Johnny, my true love,
my dear?
I knew you would never forget me,
Even in death! Come with me, let me
Show you the way now! Hold your breath, though,
And tiptoe lest stepmother hear.
What can she hear? They have made him
A grave, two years ago laid him
Away with the dead.
Save me, Mother of God! I'm afraid.
But why? Why should I flee you now?
What do I dread?
Not Johnny! I see you now,
Your eyes, your white shirt.
But it's pale as linen you are,
Cold as winter you are!
Let my lips take the cold from you,
Kiss the chill of the mould from you.
Dearest love, let me die with you,
In the deep earth lie with you,
For this world is dark and dreary,
I am lonely and weary!
Alone among the unkind ones
Who mock at my vision,
My tears their derision,
Seeing nothing, the blind ones!
Dear God! A cock is crowing,
Whitely glimmers the dawn.
Johnny! Where are you going?
Don't leave me! I am forlorn!
So, caressing, talking aloud to her
Lover, she stumbles and falls,
And her cry of anguish calls
A pitying crowd to her.
“Cross yourselves! It is surely
Her Johnny come back from the grave:
While he lived, he loved her entirely.
May God his soul now save!”
Hearing what they are saying,
I, too, start praying.
“The girl is out of her senses!”
Shouts a man with a learned air,
“My eye and my lenses
Know there's nothing there.
“Ghosts are a myth
Of ale-wife and blacksmith.
Clodhoppers! This is treason
Against King Reason!”
“Yet the girl loves,” I reply diffidently,
“And the people believe reverently:
Faith and love are more discerning
Than lenses or learning.
“You know the dead truths, not the living,
The world of things, not the world of loving.
Where does any miracle start?
Cold eye, look in your heart!”(1)

It seems that the old man in “The romantic” is none other than the rationalist professor, Jan Śniadecki. If the revolution accomplished by Mickiewicz was not an immediate victory of the spirit of romanticism over that of rationalism, it certainly was a victory in terms of language. Classical poetry had been an exercise by the learned for the learned. Now, servant girls, valets, and people barely able to read suddenly found something close to their hearts and quite understandable without any recourse to learning. Hence the success of Ballads and Romances with the lower strata of the population. Mickiewicz took fantastic folk motifs and reworded them into poems, sometimes, though rarely, even imitating the rhythm of a folk song. The mixture of the miraculous and the humorous in these poems makes one think of Ovid. Also present in the Ballads is the region of the poet's childhood, that Lithuania of fir forests and clear lakes inhabited by nymphs.

Mickiewicz's second volume, published in 1823, contained two longer works in verse: Grażyna, with the subtitle A Lithuanian Tale, and Parts Two and Four of Forefathers' Eve. Grażyna is a Lithuanian woman's name meaning “graceful.” The poem combines a metallic beat of lines and syntactical rigor with a plot and motifs dear to the romantics: night, the glimmer of armor, a cloudy sky, a moon, the gates of a castle, etc. As in many of his other early writings, Mickiewicz situates the action in his native province. The setting for Grażyna is the castle of Nowogródek; the time, the end of the fourteenth century, i.e., the Middle Ages. The Lithuanian prince, Litawor, has concluded a pact with the Teutonic Knights, pledging to fight with them against the Grand Duke of Lithuania, against whom he bears a grudge. Grażyna, his wife, learns of her husband's deed, and while he is asleep, she puts on his armor. Disguised as the prince, she leads his warriors against the Teutonic Knights. Grażyna dies from a wound received on the battlefield, but the Teutonic Knights are defeated. Her husband, regretting his action, commits suicide by leaping into the funeral pyre which consumes Grażyna's body. The figure of a heroic woman fascinated the public (for instance, in the romances of the eighteenth-century French writer Florian); she also appeared in Mickiewicz's Ballads and other early samples of his talent. This is a nonerotic heroine—a wife, a commander.

To prepare himself for the writing of Grażyna, Mickiewicz studied old chronicles, but, in fact, he endowed the historical details with a meaning quite alien to the Middle Ages; thus, Grażyna can be called a poem decrying collaboration with the enemy. As for the suicide of the prince, it is just a romantic device. Let us add here that precisely at the time he was working on Grażyna, Mickiewicz started to translate Byron's Giaour.

Another longer poem contained in the 1823 volume is the opening part of Forefathers' Eve (Dziady). Completed much later, or rather never, since he himself looked at it as a kind of “work in progress,” it is Mickiewicz's major theatrical achievement. It is also the most typical theatrical work of Polish romanticism. Its structure, of fragments joined together by a kind of dream logic, makes it difficult for a foreigner to grasp the meaning of the sequence. Therefore, let us explain that in Kowno and Wilno Mickiewicz wrote only a sketch of Part One and all of Parts Two and Four, which were published in his volume of 1823. Later on, in Dresden, he wrote Part Three, which comes after Parts Two and Four. Thus, the whole drama in verse can be basically divided into the so-called Wilno Forefathers' Eve and the Dresden Forefathers' Eve. Only a man of extraordinary perspicacity could have sought the revitalization of drama in a return to the sacred spectacles of the past, still preserved in folklore. In Mickiewicz's lifetime, peasants in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania still gathered on All Souls' Day in remote chapels to celebrate the pagan rite of calling on the dead and offering them food. Usually, an elder presided or even a local priest who connived with their centuries-old customs. It was this folk ritual, known as dziady, that Mickiewicz chose for the framework of his dramatic poem. Thus, in Part Two we see peasants at night reciting incantations and encountering ghosts. The first to appear are “light” spirits—two very rococo cherubs who cannot enter heaven because they were too happy on earth. They ask for a mustard seed, and, before leaving the folk gathered in the chapel, they recite the following admonition:

For hear and weigh it well
That according to the divine order
He who has never tasted bitterness
Will never taste sweetness in heaven.
Bo słuchajcie i zważcie u siebie,
Że według Bożego rozkazu:
Kto nie doznał goryczy ni razu,
Ten nie dozna słodyczy w niebie.

A “heavy” spirit enters next, a version of Tantalus adapted to the peasant imagination, namely, the ghost of a bad landlord. He is surrounded by predatory birds that snatch away any bit of food offered him. Since he maltreated his serfs, no one among the living can help him, and the predatory birds are the souls of those he once tortured:

Yes, I have to endure pain century after century;
The divine sentence is just,
For to him who has never been humane
No human can bring any help.
Tak muszę dręczyć się wiek wiekiem,
Sprawiedliwe zrządzenia Boże!
Bo kto nie był ni razu człowiekiem,
Temu człowiek nic nie pomoże.

The third spirit belongs to an intermediate category “of those who lived neither for man, nor for the world”: a young shepherdess, again from a rococo pastoral, who, being too proud, has rejected amorous offers from the lads and now does not want any food offered at the rite. She asks only that young peasants seize her by the hands and draw her to the earth, but in her phantom state she cannot be reached:

So hear and weigh it well
That according to the divine order
He who has never touched earth
Never will enter heaven.
Bo słuchajcie i zważcie u siebie,
Że według Bożego rozkazu:
Kto nie dotknął ziemi ni razu,
Ten nigdy nie może być w niebie.

Thus, the lesson of the scenes is drawn partly from folk wisdom and partly from the philosophy of the Enlightenment, while the division of spirits into categories carries an allusion, perhaps, to Pope's Rape of the Lock. The last spirit to appear (and he is uninvited) is the ghost of a romantic young man (Werther after his suicide?). He does not speak at all and only stares silently at one of the girls in the crowd. This figure provides a link between the rite in the chapel and the next part of the drama, to which the ceremony is a kind of overture. And, indeed, the construction of Part Two is operatic, with choruses of peasants, arias of spirits, duets, and recitatives. Its basic rhythm is a trochaic tetrameter, divided by a caesura into two equal parts. As a dramatic work permeated by an indefinable mood it is the first in Polish literature.

The next part (Part Four) relies even more upon the creation of a certain atmosphere. It is evening. A parish priest sits alone with his children (he is a Greek Catholic priest and a widower). He receives a visit from a bizarre stranger, a young man whose disjointed talk tempts the priest to consider him either a madman or a ghost. After some time, the priest recognizes him as his former pupil, Gustaw. Part Four really consists of nothing but Gustaw's monologue, spoken as if from beyond the grave, the story of unhappy love told by a creature who might belong just as well to the living as to the dead. Gustaw's story is a judgment pronounced over his own soul: how he discovered “villainous books”—sentimental literature inclining him to search for ideal love; how he encountered her; how he was rejected because she preferred worldly riches. The whole speech is punctuated by a clock striking first the hour of love, then the hour of despair, and, finally, the hour of warning. At each stroke, Gustaw stabs himself but does not fall. Nonsensical as it seems in résumé, Part Four is full of powerful poetic and dramatic effects. Its power resides in what has been called an “objective lyricism,” the ability, so typical of Mickiewicz, to embody outbursts of passion in tangible images. We have to do here with a realistic diary of the heart and, at the same time, a pronounced manifesto of individualism as a revolutionary force struggling against a social order that makes love dependent upon class divisions. Since Gustaw's monologue is based upon a flow of free associations justified by his presumed madness, what results, in fact, is a display of expressionistic technique, offering great possibilities to modern stage directors.

Before we pass on to the last part of Forefathers' Eve (written in Dresden) some biographical information is in order. In 1823, the czarist authorities clamped down upon the youth movements in Lithuania. This coincided with Alexander I's retreat from his liberal policy, but it was also an action directed against the superintendent of the Wilno school system, Prince Adam Czartoryski, by his enemies, chief of whom was the senator Novosiltsov. Not only were several high school students (aged twelve to sixteen) arrested and sent to Russia for life as common soldiers, but also the Philomaths were detected (the police owed some measure of their success to a report from a spy in Frankfurt on the Main, who was able to learn about student organizations in Wilno because they maintained ties with similar groups in Germany). In October of 1823, Mickiewicz, like his friends, was arrested and detained for about half a year in a monastery of the Basilian Fathers that had been converted into a prison. The sentences meted out at the trial were rather mild. Mickiewicz was forbidden to live in Lithuania or in any of the so-called “western guberniyas.” He was to place himself at the disposal of the authorities in Russia, where he would be given a teaching position. In November 1824 he arrived in St. Petersburg; and thus began what, for the Polish poet, proved to be a triumphant exile. Since the Philomaths had also maintained contacts with organizations in Russia, he was greeted by the young Russian intelligentsia as one of “theirs.” Moreover, his Freemasonic connections were of help. It is possible that he entered Freemasonry in Russia; in any case, it was there that he became acquainted with the writings of an eighteenth-century author popular among Russian Freemasons, Louis Claude Saint-Martin, whose influence is felt in many of the poet's works.

When Mickiewicz arrived in Russia, he was already famous in literary circles, and if we add that he was a man of simple manners, of good intellectual training, with a gift for improvisation (in French, as his Russian was weak), a talent highly appreciated then, it should not be surprising that his Russian hosts found him an extremely appealing figure. His best friends in St. Petersburg were Kondraty Ryleyev and Alexander Beztuzhev, and it is possible that had he stayed in St. Petersburg, he might have shared the fate of those Decembrist leaders. But he received a position at a lycée in Odessa, and in the winter of 1824/1825 set out for the south of Russia, making the whole cross-country trek in post sledges. Odessa was a gay port, a center of the wheat trade, with an international colony, Italian operas, balls, and social gatherings. The teaching job was purely nominal, and Mickiewicz lived, as he said himself, “like a pasha,” surrounded by women, one of whom in particular, Karolina Sobański, appears in his poetry. Karolina (nee Rzewuski), sister of the Polish writer Henryk Rzewuski, was also the mistress of General Witt, chief military commander in southern Russia (a son of famous Sofia Potocki from her first marriage). She was involved with the Russian secret service, and it seems that her report on the good behavior of her lover, Mickiewicz, was not without a positive effect on his being granted a passport for travel abroad a few years later. An excursion to the Crimea in the company of General Witt and Mrs. Sobański led Mickiewicz to write his famous Crimean Sonnets, published in Moscow in 1826 and soon translated into Russian. The work was to have assiduous translators in Russia throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The sonnet as a literary form was revived by German romantics, but Mickiewicz also looked to Petrarch for his model. In Odessa, he wrote a cycle of twenty-two love sonnets, to which Crimean Sonnets proper is the sequel. Taken together, the love sonnets and the Crimean Sonnets form a diary of internal experience expressed through what we might call today “objective correlatives.” If Mickiewicz, in many respects, is a poet on the border line of Classicism and romanticism, here he transcends those classifications thanks to the calm limpidity of his style and a complete domination of his material. The love sonnets retrace his ideal love for Maryla, pass to sensuous loves in Odessa (having nothing of the ethereal quality connected with the romantic treatment of love), and end with a bitter rejection of his transitory ties with women. The Crimean Sonnets can be seen as a strongly symbolical presentation of the poet's feelings through the corresponding landscapes. He uses two basic symbols: the sea—as an expanse of life, a distance, travel to an unknown destination, storms of passion; and the mountain—as a place above the daily turmoil of mortals, as elevation and elation. Mickiewicz was justly called a “poet of transformations,” and the rush to reach forward, beyond the given moment, to a new stage of internal development is already visible in the whole sonnet cycle. Daring metaphors go together with a manly vigor of lines. When describing a gallop, he says:

As in a broken mirror, so in my torrid eye
Pass phantoms of woods, valleys, and rocks
Jak w rozbitym źwierciedle, tak w mym spiekłym
oku
Snują się mary lasów i dolin, i głazów.

(“Bajdary”)

Or he says, speaking of the sea:

The light in its rustling plays as in the eye of a tiger
W jego szumach gra światło jak w oczach tygrysa.

(“Ałushta in Daytime” [“Ałuszta w dzień”])

Looking down on the sea from a mountain he sees “fleets and flocks of swans” and an “army of whales,” i.e., breakers:

A na głębinie fala lekko się kołysa
I kąpią się w niej floty i stada łabędzi

(“Ałushta in Daytime”)

Jak wojsko wielorybów zalegając brzegi.

(“Ajudah”)

The whole Crimean peninsula becomes for him a boat, and he apostrophizes its highest mountain peak:

O mast of the Crimean boat, Great Chatyr Dagh!
Maszcie krymskiego statku, wielki Chatyrdahu!

(“Chatyrdah”)

Through references to Islamic poetry he introduces local, oriental color into the Crimean Sonnets, and his use of many Turkish words not found in Polish dictionaries aroused the ire of the Warsaw classicists. Thus, Mickiewicz paid tribute to the fashion for oriental motifs in literature, as did Goethe and Byron, not to mention Delacroix in painting. The Orient is very much present in his sonnets on the ruins of the Moslem past in Crimea, where the tomb appears as an important symbol of the transience of human passions, and the image of night, when

the air is full of scent, that music of flowers
Powietrze tchnące wonią, tą muzyką kwiatów,

(“Ałushta at Night” [“Ałuszta w nocy”])

brings to mind Arabic poetic motifs of sensuous contemplation.

The Crimean Sonnets, like the poems written later on in Rome and Lausanne, has been justly ranked among the highest achievements in Polish lyricism.

Transferred by order of the authorities to Moscow, Mickiewicz arrived there in the beginning of 1826 at a time when a mood of depression, the aftermath of the Decembrist revolt, prevailed among the intelligentsia. He lived amid the society of literary salons, where he made new friendships—particularly with Baratynsky; Pogodin; the Lubomudry (“friends of wisdom”) group: Venevitinov, Khomyakov, Ivan Kireyevsky; with Serge Sobolevsky, a close friend of Pushkin's; and at last with Pushkin himself when he came to Moscow in the fall of that year. This meeting marks a separate chapter both in Polish and in Russian literature, as the two poets were to allude to each other, later in their respective works. Among Mickiewicz's friends, we should also mention Caroline Jaenisch, a young poetess. She was the first to translate his poems (as well as Pushkin's) into German, and she came to occupy an honorable position in Russian poetry under the name of Pavlova after she married the novelist Pavlov.

In 1828, Mickiewicz published a long poem, Konrad Wallenrod, in St. Petersburg. Completely different from his sonnets and the most “Byronic” of his works, it is a tale in verse with a subject presumably taken, as in Grażyna, from old Lithuanian chronicles. An American reading this tale would inevitably think of romantic stories about Indians brought up in a white settlement but who, responding to the call of the wild, return to their tribes to take vengeance upon the white man. Konrad, the hero, born a pagan Lithuanian, has been raised a Christian by some Teutonic Knights who captured him during one of their raids on Lithuania. By dint of valor, he has climbed to the top of the hierarchy of the Order and has been elected the Grand Master and Commander-in-Chief. But one day an old Lithuanian minstrel is permitted to entertain the Knights. His singing, in a language incomprehensible to the others, arouses the hero's awareness of his origins. To avenge the misfortune suffered by his native country at the hands of the Order, he conducts a military expedition in such a way that the Teutonic troops suffer utter disaster. In addition, the poem was supplied with a motto from Machiavelli that counseled being a fox and a lion at the same time. Although the political content was evident to every Polish reader, it was apparently not so clear to the Petersburg censorship because the work was passed. Novosiltsov, however, read it in Warsaw and sent in an alarm report containing an analysis that could have been envied by any literary critic. But because the chief of the political police, Beckendorff, detested Novosiltsov, the second edition of Konrad Wallenrod appeared in 1829—with some prefatory remarks, it is true, in which Mickiewicz paid homage to the “father of the peoples,” Czar Nicholas I. The most committed politically of all Mickiewicz's poems, Konrad Wallenrod exerted strong influence upon the young generation, although many in the name of Christian ethics objected to it for glorifying treason.

A second edition of Mickiewicz's poems, published in St. Petersburg in 1829, bore an introduction entitled “On Warsaw Critics and Reviewers,” where, with unrestrained irony, the leader of the victorious romantic trend crushed his opponents in the Warsaw periodicals “of good taste.”

Mickiewicz's efforts to obtain a passport for travel, avowedly for a health cure, finally succeeded with the help of several friends. In the spring of 1829, he set sail from Kronstadt just in time to avoid the revocation of his passport which was in the offing. From Russia he brought another type of poem, a token of his interest in Arabic poets, whom he read in translation. Faris (written in Petersburg in 1828 and published in 1829) is modeled upon the “kasida” (a lyrical form with panegyrical content). It praises a lonely Bedouin rider rushing intrepidly through the desert. An anecdote would have it that the idea came to Mickiewicz while speeding through Petersburg streets in a troika. The mad movement forward has, of course, a symbolic meaning and expresses a striving toward a mystical union with divinity. The last two lines are:

As the bee sinking her sting buries her heart with it,
So I have sunk first my thought, then my soul in heaven!
Jak pszczoła topiąc żądło i serce
z nim grzebie,
Tak ja za myślą duszę utopiłem w niebie!

While traveling through Germany with a friend, Edward Odyniec (a minor poet), Mickiewicz paid his respects to Goethe in Weimar, where he was received cordially; then, crossing the Alps, he went to Rome. There he found an international society not unlike Moscow's; even some of his Russian friends were on hand—the Princess Volkonsky and Sobolevsky, also Poles (among whom a young, pure girl, Henrietta Eve Ankwicz, seemed to be his platonic love), and some Americans like James Fenimore Cooper, with whom he liked to ride in the Roman suburbs. The period of his sojourn in Rome was marked by a return of intense and even devout religious feelings, and the profundity of the so-called “Roman lyrics” is somewhat reminiscent of the English metaphysical poets. Like the poems written not long after he left Rome, they go to the core of Mickiewicz's internal contradictions: a descendant of the Enlightenment, the poet turns violently against the pride of Reason and opposes to it the humility of Faith. Mickiewicz undoubtedly was by temperament an intuitionist, and not by chance was he the first to introduce Emerson to the Parisian public. But, despite his belief in the truth of the heart, a conflict between his personal pride and the humility required by religious orthodoxy was no less acute, and his religious lyrics bear traces of a constant tension between those two poles.

The news of the outbreak of the insurrection in Warsaw reached Mickiewicz in Rome, but he lingered quite a long time before he decided to join his compatriots; his travel expenses were paid in part by the Russian friend, Sobolevsky. For some reasons that are unclear, instead of going straight to Poland, he went to Paris—perhaps carrying a message from Italian Carbonari to French radicals. Deeply disillusioned by French politicians, he traveled across Germany to the Prussian-occupied part of Poland near the border guarded by Russian troops. By then it was the middle of August 1831; the Poles had clearly lost the war, and he could not, or did not want to, reach Warsaw. A love affair with a bluestocking (Konstancja Łubieński, who later on pestered him with letters asking him to marry her), receptions, and hunting parties at the moment when Poland was suffering a military defeat seemed to remain with Mickiewicz as a permanent font of remorse. That very remorse, perhaps, released a tremendous force of inspiration when he landed in Dresden, then full of Polish refugees. Indeed, the period between 1832 and 1834 was one of incredible productivity for Mickiewicz. It was in Dresden that he wrote the continuation of Forefathers' Eve (Part Three). The drama thus completed (though Mickiewicz planned to write other parts) can be called a morality play revived as well as a Promethean poem. It is the story of a man surrounded by supernatural powers and struggling for his salvation. At the same time, through a strong autobiographical element and its loose, fragmentary character, it is a typically romantic work. In the preceding parts we saw Gustaw with his unhappy love; here we find him in a czarist prison, an alter ego of Mickiewicz during his half-year imprisonment in Wilno. There comes a night when the prisoner is transformed from a man preoccupied with his personal problems into a man dedicated to the cause of his nation and of humanity. To mark it, he even changes his name to Konrad—Mickiewicz had given the name before to his Lithuanian hero. Politics is introduced in a series of realistically treated scenes, making any application of a formula to such a work of disparate techniques extremely difficult. The problem of the prisoner, Konrad, is that of human suffering, and of God's permitting it. If God is indifferent while he, Konrad, is not, it means that he is morally superior to God. His monologue of defiance addressed to God in magnificent verse is known in Polish literature as “the Great Improvisation.” Prompted by evil spirits, he is ready to insult God: “You are not the father of the world but a. …” He is saved from pronouncing “czar” by the intervention of good spirits. He undergoes one more transformation: from proud rebel into humble fighter for the collective cause, but not in revolt against Providence—a foreshadowing of Mickiewicz's future activity as a Christian Socialist. As befits a morality play, earth, heaven, and hell are present on the stage. Good is represented by the prisoner's guardian angel, by choruses of night spirits on the right side, by angels, by a humble Roman Catholic priest (Father Peter), by an innocent girl (Eve), by Polish and Russian revolutionary youth; while evil is personified by devils, night spirits on the left side, czarist officials, Senator Novosiltsov in person, and Polish “good society”—collaborationists and opportunists. This is, in a sense, also a poem of the night. In dreams, the veil hiding a deeper, supernatural reality is lifted and man enters into contact with mysterious powers. The main characters—Konrad, Father Peter, Eve—live through their most intense experiences in visions. Into Father Peter's vision, Mickiewicz inserts a messianic prophecy that holds out the hope of a great man who will lead Poland and humanity toward bright destinies. Even a cabalistic cipher, to designate him—forty-four, an equivalent of the Hebrew letters DM—is introduced. (Does it stand for Adam, for Mickiewicz himself? We do not know, and the author confessed that he had known only at the time of writing.) Whatever its meaning, it is an obvious reflection of eighteenth-century Illuminism and cabalism in a new romantic setting. Written extremely fast—Forefathers' Eve, Part Three, sometimes sounds as if it had been dictated to a medium—and published in Paris in the same year as it was composed (1832), it remained a splendid dramatic poem until 1901, as only modern stage directors dared to present it on the stage. Mickiewicz, in his sixteenth lecture of 1843 at the Collège de France, which was to become a kind of gospel for Polish theater directors of the twentieth century, spoke of the essence of the Slavic theater of the future as an interplay of the natural and the supernatural; thus, the Slavic drama, in his intention, was to be an heir to Greek religious tragedy and the medieval religious theater. As to staging, he anticipated a flowering of architecture, painting, and music that would make possible the presentation of such dramas. In his own time, he saw only one building that seemed suitable for the purpose: the Olympic Circus in Paris. Forefathers' Eve was first introduced into the repertoire of the Polish theater by the reformer Stanisław Wyspiański (1869-1907). Afterward it became a kind of national sacred play, occasionally forbidden by censorship because of its emotional impact upon the audience. The most complex and rich among the products of romanticism, combining dreams with brutal, realistic satire, it has been looked upon as the highest test of skill for theater directors.

When Forefathers' Eve appeared in print, it was accompanied by a long descriptive poem entitled Digression (Ustep), written sometime before Part Three and summing up Mickiewicz's Russian experiences. Logically, it is connected with the drama as a picture of the country to which Gustaw-Konrad (Mickiewicz) is taken after his imprisonment in Wilno, and it follows Mickiewicz's itinerary, as the titles of the chapters indicate—“The Road to Russia,” “The Outskirts of the Capital,” “Petersburg,” “The Monument to Peter the Great,” “Military Review,” and “The Day Before the St. Petersburg Flood of 1824.” Here again, as so often in Mickiewicz, we move from an ultra-romantic drama to a sharp, biting classical verse which could have been envied by the eighteenth-century satirists. The whole poem portrays czarist Russia as a huge prison, but is full of pity for the oppressed Russian nation and meditates upon the future of this country frozen in a despotic system. The imagery is that of winter. Even the inhabitants of that snow-covered land are depicted as bearing in themselves souls like pupae awaiting the spring:

But when the sun of freedom will shine,
What insect will fly out from that envelope?
Will it be a bright butterfly soaring over the earth,
Or a moth, dirty tribe of the night?
Ale gdy słońce wolności zaświeci,
Jakiż z powłoki tej owad wyleci?
Czy motyl jasny wzniesie się nad ziemię,
Czy ćma wypadnie, brudne nocy plemię?

The city of St. Petersburg stands as a symbol of despotism for Mickiewicz. Built by order of the czar in a most unsuitable place, it rests on the bones of thousands of serfs who perished during the construction. The slow, organic growth of Western European cities is compared with that urban monument to the sheer will of one man. In the chapter entitled “The Monument to Peter the Great,” Mickiewicz shows two poets under the statue: one is himself; the other, Pushkin. Into the Russian's mouth he puts a long speech similar in content to the Pole's (his own) meditation. The Russian poet compares the czar on his horse to a waterfall suddenly frozen solid and suspended over a precipice:

But when the sun of freedom will throw its rays
And the western wind will warm these states,
What will happen to the waterfall of tyranny?
Lecz skoro słońce swobody zabłyśnie
I wiatr zachodni ogrzeje te państwa,
I cóż się stanie z kaskadą tyraństwa?

The chapter called “Military Review” expresses the horror of army pageants in St. Petersburg, which last for hours and leave in their wake frozen bodies of soldiers on the enormous, empty squares of the capital. The last chapter, on the flood, bears a second title: “Oleszkiewicz.” The name refers to a friend of the Polish poet, a painter, a Freemason, and a mystic who introduced him to the works of Saint-Martin and to the cabala; in the poem, Oleszkiewicz prophesies the doom of the czarist empire, that kingdom of evil incarnate. The great flood with its unleashing of elemental forces brings to completion, thus, the symbol of winter present throughout the poem. For Russia, spring will be a calamity, a time of immense suffering. The Digression can be called a summation of Polish attitudes toward Russia in the nineteenth century, and Joseph Conrad, who of course had read that poem, seems to repeat its contents line for line in some of his writings, especially in Under Western Eyes. Pushkin was prompted by it to write a reply to Mickiewicz, and the outcome was his masterpiece, The Bronze Horseman, set just at the time of the St. Petersburg flood and centered around the statue of Peter the Great. Pushkin attempted to convey his love for the city and his ambivalence—his feelings of fascination and fear—toward Peter as the epitome of a ruler. The dialogue between the two poets was probably also provoked by the poem placed at the very end of Forefathers' Eve, after the Digression, and entitled “To My Muscovite Friends.” In it, Mickiewicz deplores the fate of the Decembrists—Ryleyev executed, Beztuzhev condemned to hard labor—and castigates those who dishonor themselves by accepting “honorary” distinctions and high positions from the czar or by singing his triumphs with mercenary pens:

Whoever of you will raise a complaint, for me his complaint
Will be like the barking of a dog, so accustomed
To wearing his collar long and patiently,
That he is ready to bite the hand which tears at it.
Kto z was podniesie skargę, dla mnie jego skarga
Będzie jak psa szczekanie, który tak się wdroży
Do cierpliwie i długo noszonej obroży,
Że w końcu gotów kąsać—rękę,
co ją targa.

Yet Mickiewicz stressed perfect frankness in his relations with Russian literati—“crawling in silence like a snake,” he deluded the despot, but for his Russian friends he always had a “dovelike simplicity.”

Forefathers' Eve in the shape we know it today appeared in Paris in 1832, and at the end of the same year we see Mickiewicz himself in Paris, deeply involved in the political quarrels and intrigues of the Great Emigration. The émigrés were split into two factions: democratic, and conservative monarchist. Those on the left side of the spectrum were represented, first of all, by Joachim Lelewel, an eminent historian, an ex-professor at the University of Wilno, whom Mickiewicz as a student once honored with a poem; and Maurycy Mochnacki, the leading literary critic of romanticism, author of the book On Polish Literature of the Nineteenth Century (O literaturze polskiej wieku dziewiętnastego, 1830). Mochnacki was the first in exile to explain the failure of the Polish revolution by the reluctance of propertied classes to call all the people to arms. On the right, the conservatives rallied around Hôtel Lambert, the residence of Prince Adam Czartoryski, onetime foreign minister of Alexander I and later superintendent of the Wilno school district. Mickiewicz was closer to the democrats, but he took no sides. He maintained: “The Pole is a natural democrat and republican.” Besides many articles, he wrote The Books of the Polish Nation and of the Polish Pilgrims (Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego) in 1832, and sent it immediately to the printer. A strong conviction that truth is accessible not to the wise men of this world but to simple-souled, humble people endowed with intuition inclined him to address the Polish exiles in as simple a style as possible. The form of the work copies the gospel parables and their Polish imitations by Skarga. It is also possible that Saint-Martin's rhythmically modulated sentences influenced him. As to its contents, The Books develops the messianic idea put forward in Forefathers' Eve. Poland was to redeem the nations through her suffering, and the mission of the Polish pilgrims was to announce to the materialistic Western nations a new world spiritually transformed. Rural, patriarchal Poland is contrasted to the West, contaminated by the diabolical forces of money, much as Russian Slavophiles opposed their country to the West. Mickiewicz talks with the authority of a prophet. He, as a Pole, has been charged to warn Frenchmen and Englishmen of a despotism that will subjugate all Europe if it is connived with and tolerated in one part of Europe:

… and you, tradesmen and merchants of two nations, avid for gold and paper with the value of gold, you used to send money for the crushing of freedom, but indeed, the days will come when you will lick your gold and masticate your paper and nobody will send you bread and water.

In another passage:

And to the Frenchman and the Englishman the Pole says: If you, children of freedom, do not follow me, then God will reject your tribe and will rouse defenders of freedom out of stones, that is, out of the Muscovites and the Asiatics.

The Books encountered the hostility of both the Catholic clergy and the Polish democrats, for whom it was too mystical. It found a considerable response, though, when translated into foreign languages. The French writer Lamennais, a Catholic priest whose socialistic-religious ideas had led to a clash with the Vatican, and who was a close friend of Mickiewicz's, was clearly indebted to The Books in his Paroles d'un croyant.

As we said, the years 1832-1834 were years of creative vigor for Mickiewicz. Notwithstanding the turmoil of journalistic chores (being the editor of a periodical, the Polish Pilgrim), he wrote during this time a work of pure poetry. Pan Tadeusz had very little to do with the ideological conflicts of the day. Indeed, when starting that long poem, he treated it as an island to which he could escape, “closing the door on Europe's noises.” According to his original intention, it was to be a modest idyll somewhat in the genre of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea. Gradually, it grew into an imposing whole, divided into twelve books, where the Polish Alexandrine (thirteen-syllable couplets) was put to a use which Mickiewicz's eighteenth-century masters would never have suspected. Pan Tadeusz is something unique in world literature, and the problem of how to classify it has remained the crux of a constant quarrel among scholars. Is it a “novel in verse”? an epos? a fairy tale? In it Mickiewicz returned to the country of his childhood and adolescence—Lithuania of 1811/1812. Because the world he was describing was gone forever, he could achieve a perfect distance, visible in the kind of humor which permeates the lines. Indeed, the painting of a provincial microcosm was an extremely attractive undertaking for an exile in Paris who looked for solace in “the remembrance of things past.” The American scholar, Professor George R. Noyes, was probably close to the truth when he spoke of the “childish freshness” with which Mickiewicz endowed his landscapes and his people—a childish freshness and amazement of the kind best expressed in English in some lines of the British metaphysical poet, Thomas Traherne. A fragment of a letter written much later by Mickiewicz (at the end of his life, when he was in Turkey) also provides a clue to his ability to see beauty in most trivial things:

I have heard that in Smyrna there is a supposed “Grotto of Homer” but I am not curious! I looked at something else. A pile of manure and rubbish was lying there, all the remnants together: manure, trash, slops, bones, broken pots, half a sole of an old slipper, some feathers—this I liked! Long did I stand there because it was just like the front yard of an inn in Poland!

Translated into prose, Pan Tadeusz often sounds like a Walter Scott novel. In verse, the amount of faithfully reproduced details from everyday life takes one by surprise because it seems hardly credible that these can be the material of poetry. Even involved lawsuits are true to what we know of the juridical quarrels of the period. Yet Pan Tadeusz does not tell the story of a “problematic hero” in conflict with his surroundings and, for that reason, is a long way from nineteenth-century novels. In fact all of its characters are mediocre, average people immersed in their society and not suffering from alienation. Such perfect harmony between the characters and the world they are destined to live in is an essential trait of the ancient epic, and this is why Pan Tadeusz has been called “the last epos” in world literature. Like the Iliad and Jerusalem Delivered, which begin with an invocation addressed to the Deity, Pan Tadeusz begins with an invocation to Lithuania, whose strongly personified nature in all its mornings, sunsets, storms, and serene skies gives to small human affairs a kind of benevolent blessing. On the other hand, there is much of the mock-heroic epic in Pan Tadeusz; the poet's eighteenth-century training comes out in an inclination to literary parody—where Homeric lines are applied to a skirmish between squires and Russian soldiers or a magnificent centerpiece is described in the terms Homer used for Achilles' shield. At the same time, some books of the poem are just idylls, revealing Mickiewicz, in addition, as an inheritor of the whole bucolic trend that started with Rej. But the modern reader is also justified if he plunges into Pan Tadeusz as into a fairy tale, with its aura of remoteness and its simplified psychological portraits. For those who are acquainted with Polish literature of the Enlightenment, Pan Tadeusz appears to owe a good deal to eighteenth-century comedy; some characters act as if they came straight from the plays of Zabłocki or Niemcewicz. In Pan Tadeusz Mickiewicz, a romantic poet, returned to his classical beginnings but with infinitely greater skill. Only one figure can be regarded as slightly “Byronic”—Father Robak, a monk with a tragic past. Otherwise, the “sentimentalists” such as the Count and Telimena, are gently ridiculed. Laurence Sterne, so appreciated by Mickiewicz and his friends when they were students, even lends a few devices, and the “hobbies” of some of the characters in Pan Tadeusz are no less strange than Uncle Toby's in Tristram Shandy. As in Sterne, certain lines referring to those hobbies create leitmotifs and recur with the same rhymes every time a given person enters the action.

Pan Tadeusz is also a vast panorama of a gentry society at the moment it is living through its last days. One of Mickiewicz's contemporaries, Stanisław Worcell, leader of the most radical Polish émigrés (Gromady ludu polskiego), described it as “a tombstone laid by the hand of a genius upon our Old Poland.” The richness of human types, taken as they are, without any bile or moralizing, so conquers our attention that we forget about the limited field of observation. A manor, a village of gentry farmers, a half-ruined aristocratic castle quite suffice while peasants move somewhere far in the background and tradesmen appear only in the person of wise Jankiel, a Jewish innkeeper famous for his skill in playing the dulcimer. The element of politics is not lacking, for the action takes place on the eve of the Napoleonic expedition against Moscow and is completed by it. But it is politics of a not very complex sort. At the end of the poem the young generation dons the uniform of the Polish Napoleonic army and in response to the spirit of the day proclaims the peasant a free citizen.

Pan Tadeusz, after its appearance, was not highly praised by those simple people whom Mickiewicz desired for his readers. The Polish exiles found its tone not elevated enough, and no wonder, if they compared it with a gospel-like tract, The Books of the Polish Nation, by the same author. A handful of writers saw it as a masterpiece, although Mickiewicz himself did not. After having put the last touches to the poem, he said: “I hope I will never again use my pen for trifles.” But Pan Tadeusz gradually won recognition as the highest achievement in all Polish literature for having transformed into poetry what seemed by its very nature to resist any such attempt. In it, Mickiewicz's whole literary training culminates in an effortless conciseness where every word finds its proper place as if predestined throughout the many centuries of the history of the Polish language.

After Pan Tadeusz, Mickiewicz wrote nothing more in verse, except for a few lyrical poems of rare perfection. His silence has been variously interpreted. A teacher, a prophet, a publicist, an organizer, he chose the life of action as if to confirm what he had once said, paraphrasing German mystics: that it is more difficult to live honestly through one day than to write a book. He was devoured by a need for shaping history directly, and poetry did not seem to him powerful enough; it lost out in a struggle with reality. Some scholars explain his silence by suggesting that he simply ran out of talent. Perhaps, living in France where the literary scene was rapidly changing, where the novel was growing—and nothing is more characteristic of the fate of Polish literature than that Mickiewicz, unlike Pushkin, did not attempt to write prose fiction—he realized that to continue in his accustomed style was impossible. He said once himself that he saw a promised land of future poetry, but he would never enter it.

He settled down in his life as an exile. His books were smuggled into Poland, but even the mention of his name was forbidden by censorship. He married a young girl whom he had known in Moscow as a teen-ager, Celina Szymanowski, brought up several children in that far from happy marriage, taught Latin literature with success at the College of Lausanne, and held the first chair of Slavic literatures at the Collège de France in Paris during the years 1840-1844. His courses in Slavic literatures given there fill several large volumes, and, though obsolete today from the point of view of modern scholarship, they are full of daring insights. In his courses, he paid tribute to his Russian friends, the writers, especially to Pushkin. He spoke to the Paris public on an unknown American writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and translated some of his essays. The similarity between the views of the two men is sometimes striking. But practically all his life, Mickiewicz longed for a “providential man” matching Napoleon. Perhaps at times he assigned such a prophetic role to himself; for a while, when he was a professor in Paris, he became a true believer in a certain Andrzej Towiański, the founder of a religious sect. In Towiański's teachings it is not difficult to uncover the heritage of eighteenth-century mystical lodges; and since Mickiewicz, thanks to Saint-Martin, was imbued with the same spirit, he was ready to recognize in Towiański's magnetic personality his spiritual master. He carried his enthusiasm to the classroom, transforming his university chair into a pulpit for preaching the new politico-religious creed, thereby driving the French Government to despair, and as a consequence he was finally deprived of his position. The poetry after Pan Tadeusz, mentioned above, is limited to exquisite, gnomic poems, extremely short and concise, just “thoughts” adapted from the German mystics, Jakob Boehme and Angelus Silesius, and from Saint-Martin. When in Lausanne, he wrote a few verses, the so-called “Lausanne lyrics,” untranslatable masterpieces of metaphysical meditation. In Polish literature they are examples of that pure poetry which verges on silence.

The year 1848 for Mickiewicz marked a passage into direct political action. He went to Italy and organized a Polish legion there to fight for the liberation of the northern Italians from Austria. His plan was to attract to that nucleus soldiers of Slavic descent from the Austrian army and to pave the way for the breakdown of the Hapsburg Empire by appealing to Slavic nationalism—an idea that materialized at the end of World War I. Mickiewicz himself proclaimed a set of “principles” (Sklad zasad) for the legion, a sort of political manifesto outlining the system that would underlie the independent Slavic states of the future. A Christian and progressive interpretation of quality, liberty, and fraternity, it declares for example:

Everybody in the nation is a citizen. All citizens are equal before the law and before the administration. … To the Jew, our elder brother, esteem and help on his way to eternal good and welfare, and in all matters equal rights. … To every family, a plot of land under the care of the community. To every community, common land under the care of the nation.

Equal rights for women were also proclaimed, and a fraternal hand was extended from Poland to brothers Czech and Russ. Certain features of Utopian Socialism are distinguishable in that credo, and although Mickiewicz and his legion were greeted by enthusiastic crowds in Rome, Florence, and other Italian towns, he let himself in for violent attacks from the émigré Polish Right, especially after he committed the indiscretion, at his audience with Pope Pius IX, of grabbing the Pontiff by the sleeve and shouting: “Let me tell you that the Holy Spirit resides today under the shirts of the Paris workers.” The pan-European revolution of 1848 soon proved a failure; yet the next year, 1849, Mickiewicz was editing an international socialist paper in Paris, La Tribune des Peuples, whose contributors included French followers of Fourier and Proudhon, Russian followers of Bakunin, Italian followers of Mazzini, one German, Ewerbeck (a personal friend of Marx and Engels), and some Poles from the democratic Left. The enterprise did not last long, being soon killed by censorship. Mickiewicz, for the next few years, held a modest job as librarian at the Library of the Arsenal. But the Crimean War again drew him into organizational activity. Polish and Cossack legions were being formed in Constantinople, and Mickiewicz left for the Near East in 1855 to aid the cause of struggle against Russia. With his friend Armand Lévy, who under the poet's influence returned to the faith of his Jewish ancestors, Mickiewicz set about organizing a Jewish legion and applied to the Turkish Government for permission to enlist not only Russian Jews (prisoners of war) but also Jews from Palestine. Mickiewicz's strong pro-Jewish feelings throughout his life and his messianic philosophy based upon an analogy between the history of the Jews and that of the Poles led some Jewish scholars to conjecture about the partly Jewish origin of Mickiewicz. His mother's name was that of a Frankist … family, but there are no documents to corroborate such a thesis. His interest in the Bible and the cabala seems to be due mainly to his penchant for eighteenth-century Illuminism, which itself was strongly influenced by Jewish religious writings.

Mickiewicz, while visiting a military camp near Constantinople, contracted cholera and died suddenly in the arms of his faithful Armand Lévy. His body was taken to France, and a few decades later, in 1890, his remains were transported to Poland and buried in the royal crypt of Wawel Castle's cathedral in Kraków.

Mickiewicz is for Poles what Goethe is for Germans and Pushkin for Russians. There is an additional element, that of his biography as pilgrim, leader, and fighter. Thus, if Byron after his death in Greece fired the imagination of the early romantics (and of Mickiewicz himself), Mickiewicz through his life of service to the Polish cause grew into the embodiment of a “national bard” and a spiritual commander for the generations to come. If the phases of his activity seem bizarre to us today, they were not in the context of an era marked by the most wild élans of the European mind. We can, however, admire the soberness that we find at least in his poetry. By virtue of his upbringing he was certainly a man close to the Englightenment. The poetic discipline he acquired through modeling his early poems on the classics puts him at the opposite pole from such romantics as Shelley or Musset or Alfred de Vigny. For Poles, Kochanowski's estate “Czarnolas,” like Parnassus in Greece, is a metaphor for poetry; after Mickiewicz, Lithuania also became a kind of seat of the Muses. Curiously enough, Poland's greatest poet never set foot in Warsaw or Kraków. He was a posthumous child of the old Respublica. …

Notes

1. Translated by W. H. Auden.