[A celebrated Polish poet, essayist, and novelist, Miłosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. In the following excerpt from a work first published in 1969, he explores some of the main historical events that contributed to the character of Polish Romanticism, asserting that "Polish Romanticism was thoroughly imbued with historicism."]

After the third partition [of Poland], the Respublica disappeared from the map of Europe, but it survived in the minds of its inhabitants. To keep the three areas of the previous Polish state apart, profoundly united as they were by a common language and tradition, was no easy task for the occupying powers. And it was not only in Polish minds that the Respublica remained alive: as late as 1848, Karl Marx called for a reconstruction of Poland based on the map of 1772, i.e., before the first partition. The fall of the Polish state coincided in time with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte's star, and the hopes of the Poles went out toward this man. Indeed, so great was the impact of the Napoleonic legend upon the Polish mentality that it entitles us to include several decades of Polish history in this [essay].

In 1797, a Polish Napoleonic legion was created in Italy. Loyal to the French ruler, in spite of his callous treatment of Polish troops (out of several thousands of Polish soldiers who were sent to Haiti to put down the revolution of Toussaint L'Ouverture, only a few hundred returned), the commanders of the Polish Napoleonic troops saw their fidelity recompensed in 1806 when the Napoleonic army entered Warsaw (in Prussian hands since the third partition). Napoleon's victory over Prussia led to the creation (in the treaty of Tilsit) of a tiny Polish state called the Duchy of Warsaw. A constitution modeled upon France's was granted by Napoleon in 1807, and the Napoleonic Code was introduced. The constitution recognized the peasants as free and equal citizens, but did not give them ownership of the land. This should be stressed, as it explains the difference between the peasant's status in central Poland and his status in Russia and in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. After the Napoleonic constitution went into effect, the peasant in central Poland was still obliged to work in the fields of his landlord, but he was not a serf.

The new Duchy of Warsaw was soon engaged in a successful war against Austria on the side of Napoleon and in this way was able to extend its boundaries to incorporate the territory taken from the Austrian-occupied provinces. Later on, in 1812, the Duchy supplied Napoleon with some troops for his invasion of Russia. In his army of over a half-million men, Poles accounted for about 100,000.

Napoleon's defeat and withdrawal took the faithful Polish units west again, and their commander, Marshal Józef Poniatowski, died on the battlefield near Leipzig. When the Holy Alliance of monarchs assembled at the Congress of Vienna to redraw the map of Europe, one of the most difficult problems, in view of the subterranean tensions between the victors, was the Polish question. The powers agreed, at last, to recognize the creation of a Kingdom of Poland (known later in history as the "Congress Kingdom") bound in a personal union to Russia. The Russian czar was to be crowned king of Poland, but was to pledge that his rule would respect local law and the parliament. Thus, an autocratic czar was to be a constitutional monarch in Poland. The paradox inherent in such an arrangement proved later to be the seed of failure. Russia, Prussia, and Austria retained large areas of the old Respublica's territory. Unable to settle a troublesome dispute over Krakó w, the Congress proclaimed it a free city under the international supervision of the three neighboring powers. It remained thus from 1815 to 1846.

The Kingdom of Poland, whose nominal head was Czar Alexander I (crowned the Polish king), possessed a strong army, trained mostly by former Napoleonic officers who were magnanimously forgiven their fighting against Russia. The army was the "pet" of the Czar's brother, Grand Duke Constantine, an unbalanced, if not half-insane man, who resided in Warsaw and behaved not unlike a boy playing with tin soldiers. Inhuman discipline in the army led to many desperate acts, including suicide, on the parts of both officers and subordinates. Grand Duke Constantine (who appears often in Polish literature) had, probably, a kind of passion for Poland. In any case, he cannot be held responsible for the proliferation of secret police "services"—of various kinds; these were fostered by Russian civil commissars such as the famous Novosiltsov. Steadily increasing friction weakened the already tenuous connection between the administration and the parliament, not to speak of public opinion, and reflected Alexander I's gradual abandonment of a liberal policy in Russia. Yet, for a decade and a half, the precarious order of things arranged at the Congress of Vienna gave the Poles, regardless of the province they inhabited, considerable opportunities for cultural and economic development. Much was done for the economy in the Kingdom by the minister of finance, Lubecki; while the network of schools created by the Commission for National Education freely continued its activity. A new university in Warsaw was founded in 1816. The University of Wilno (situated in the territory annexed to the Russian Empire) was considered the best institution of learning in all Russia, while an excellent new lycée was established in Krzemieniec in Volhynia. Krakó w, of course, preserved its traditions as an ancient capital, and its university profited from the reforms introduced by the men of the Enlightenment. Generally speaking, in both the Kingdom of Poland and in the Russian-occupied provinces there were no attempts to curtail teaching or publishing in the Polish language.

Around 1820, a movement among the youth, the expression of which in literature came to be called Romanticism, spread through Poland, and it took on organizational forms similar to those of the revolutionary brotherhoods in Germany. Clandestine contacts were established with young Russians, who, after their attempt at seizing power in December of 1825, were to be known under the name of Decembrists. When the new czar, Nicholas I, unleashed his rule of unmitigated police terror upon the country, the revolutionary spark was ready to flare. In November 1830, a group of young officers of the Polish army revolted and, during a dramatic November night, succeeded in bringing Warsaw over to their side. The insurrection of 1830 amounted, in fact, to a war between Poland and Russia. The parliament voted an act which dethroned the Czar as king of Poland. Military activities lasted practically throughout the year of 1831, but Poland was at last defeated. During the so-called Great Emigration which followed, several thousands of officers and soldiers and a number of the most active intellectuals left the country, migrating first to Germany, then to France. Paris, for some two decades, became the center of Polish cultural and political life. The order upheld by the Holy Alliance of monarchs was looked upon by Polish writers and political leaders as a diabolical conspiracy against the peoples of Europe. Many of them placed their stakes, therefore, on revolutionary groups in Western Europe like the Italian Carbonari and the French Utopian Socialists. The Emigration was divided within itself: The conservatives grouped around the so-called "Hôtel Lambert" (a private residence in Paris). They were partisans of a constitutional monarchy for Poland and members of the aristocratic Establishment. The democrats, whose main organization was the Democratic Society, placed their hopes in a revolution of European peoples against the tyrants. Still further to the left were the Polish People's Communes (Gromady Ludu Polskiego), composed mostly of former rank-and-file soldiers residing on the mainland of England and on the island of Jersey. They advocated a revolution in Poland that would lead to a division of landed estates among the peasants in the spirit of Christian communism. The causes of the defeat of the 1830 revolution became the subject of infinite debates among the émigrés. According to radical democrats, the Poles could have won by proclaiming economic freedom for the peasants, arming them, and carrying their revolutionary fervor to the Russian masses. All Polish writings of the period abound in mystical appeals to the Napoleonic myth as a force which would abolish the reactionary order oppressing Europe.

The Kingdom of Poland, after the insurrection of 1830-1831, preserved but weak vestiges of autonomy. The University of Warsaw was closed down in 1831. The University of Wilno, regarded as a hot-bed of dangerous ideas, soon shared the same fate. The czarist government also began a campaign of persecution directed against the Greek Catholic Church in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a church of Byelorussian peasants. The very existence of non-Orthodox Eastern Slavs was considered an offense to the principle of unity between the czarist throne and the Orthodox Church, a unity vital for the Russian monarchy.

The 1830s, in spite of the loss of the most energetic leaders, who had escaped to the West, witnessed some abortive conspiracies, which grew in force with the advent of the 1840s. A Roman Catholic priest from the neighborhood of Lublin, Father Piotr Ściegienny, succeeded in weaving a vast clandestine network among the peasants with a program of communist revolution. His propaganda booklet was conceived as a presumed letter from the Pope to the peasants, calling for banishment of the lords and for fraternity with the Russian peasant as a brother in the same fate. The participants in that conspiracy were sent to hard-labor camps in Siberia. There, some of them became Dostoevsky's cell mates, and he mentions them in his Notes from the House of the Dead. The unrest in Poland increased with the approach of the fateful year of 1848, the "spring of nations." Edward Dembowski, a young philosopher of aristocratic origin, a brilliant writer in the spirit of the Hegelian Left, was one of the leaders of the short-lived revolution in the free city of Krakó w in 1846, and he died in a clash of the crowd with the Austrian troops. He had tried in vain to avert an anti-revolutionary scheme of the Austrian authorities, namely, a peasant revolt in southern Poland. The peasants attacked the manors, massacring their owners (sometimes even sawing them in half). Their leader, Jakub Szela (a character who turns up often in the literature of the twentieth century), acted at the instigation of the Austrian officials, for whom a peasant revolt was a tool to drive a wedge into Polish solidarity based on patriotic aspirations—the gentry being frightened to death, after the peasant rebellion, of the "dark masses."

In 1848, an insurrection broke out in Prussian-occupied Poland, and, for a while, battles took place between Prussian troops and Polish volunteer detachments. The government of the Hapsburg Empire, pressured by revolutions in Vienna (and Lwów), granted Galician peasants the right to own land and freed them from obligatory duties to their lords. The revolution in Hungary attracted many Poles, among them a general of the artillery, Józef Bern, who became one of the chief commanders of the Hungarian revolutionary army and to this day has remained for the Hungarians a half-legendary figure, known as "Daddy Bern." In Italy, the leading Polish Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, organized a small legion composed of artists and intellectuals that fought for the Italian cause against the Austrians in Lombardy, and then with Garibaldi in the defense of republican Rome. In 1849 Mickiewicz founded an international socialist newspaper in Paris, La Tribune des Peuples. The complete breakdown of the European revolutionary movement evoked despair and dejection among the Poles, but soon new hopes were born with the outbreak of the Crimean War, allying Turkey with France and England against Russia. A Polish legion was formed in Constantinople comprising Russian war prisoners of Polish descent. Adam Mickiewicz was active there, too, and together with his friend Armand Lévy, brought to short-lived fruition his idea of a Jewish legion, the first Jewish military unit in modern times. Russia's defeat in the Crimean War and the death of the "gendarme-czar," Nicholas I, released a movement of the liberal intelligentsia in Russia pressuring for decisive reforms. The emancipation of the peasants was proclaimed in 1861 (the czar's edict did not cover central Poland, where the situation of the peasant had been different ever since the Napoleonic constitution of 1807). Thwarted expectations of national autonomy in Poland resulted in increasing unrest among Warsaw's population, where a clandestine revolutionary committee had begun to act. It owed its organization primarily to a poet, Apollo Korzeniowski, father of the future English novelist, Joseph Conrad. Clashes between Warsaw crowds and Russian troops occurred more and more frequently. An unwise decision of Count Alexander Wielopolski, the civil governor of Poland and a most influential figure among the Polish conservatives, led to the outbreak of a new Polish insurrection in January 1863. Wielopolski had advised Russian military authorities to draft all young men suspected of political activity for some twenty years of service. The Provisional National Government, which grew out of the clandestine revolutionary committee, announced the economic emancipation of the peasants. The Russian troops fought throughout 1863—against detachments of guerrillas composed not only of Poles but also of some Russians, Germans, French, and Italians, followers of Garibaldi. A meeting of workers in London, organized by Karl Marx to express solidarity with the Poles, culminated in the creation of the First Socialist International. But the insurrection of 1863 was doomed in advance by lack of arms and by the nearly complete indifference of the peasants to the appeals of their compatriots. Guerrilla detachments included only the nobles, the petty gentry, artisans, and some workers of budding industrial enterprises. Only in Lithuania was peasant participation considerable. "Pacification" meant for Poland the gallows, deportations to Siberia, and ruinous taxation of landed estates. In its policy, the czarist government applied principles elaborated by certain Russian Pan-Slavists according to whom the upper layers of "Latinized" Polish society were traitors to the cause of Slavdom, as opposed to the "good" (i.e., truly Slavic) Polish peasants. The peasants were told that the insurrection was an intrigue of the nobles directed against the benevolent czar who had emancipated the peasantry. In fact, however, it had been the manifesto of the Provisional National Government that had forced the hand of the czarist authorities, who then granted Polish peasants economic emancipation with slightly better conditions than in Russia. The year 1863 closed a whole era, that of Romanticism in politics and in literature. A constant looking forward toward a mythical upheaval of European nations was to be superseded by a call for sober concentration upon small economic and cultural tasks.

Heroic insurrections, participation in revolutionary movements all over Europe, retaliative executions carried out by the occupying powers, and deportations to Siberia unavoidably shaped the Polish mentality. These crucial events came at a time when modern nationalism was crystallizing under the impact of the French Revolution and German philosophy. In the old Respublica the line between "Polishness" and "non-Polishness" had been a blurred one. Skarga's Sermons, for instance, contained hints of a messianic vocation assigned to the Poles, but this idea can be interpreted as stemming from an attachment to the state's institutions, rather than from a worship, on Skarga's part, of the "nation" as a spiritual unit. But when Poland lost her independence, the concept of "Polishness" gradually emerged as an ethereal entity requiring loyalty and existing even without embodiment in a state. It is extremely difficult to make an impartial appraisal of the Polish mentality in the period we are dealing with. If the history of the country can be called "abnormal," its thought and literature were no less so. An old tendency to idealize "golden freedom," which had distinguished Poland from her neighbors, the autocratic monarchies, underwent a mutation: enormous talents for self-pity were displayed, and Poland was presented as an innocent victim suffering for the sins of humanity. This new version contained the additives of Napoleonic myth and Utopian Socialism. Hatred for the main occupying power, Russia, inclined the Poles to interpret the conflict between the two countries as a struggle between the forces of light (democracy), on the one hand, and those of darkness (tyranny), on the other. Russia was not "European"; it was "Asiatic," marked forever by the Tartar yoke. In all fairness we should add that such views were not the property of the Poles alone, as a leading revolutionary, Karl Marx, considered the Slavs as born slaves with the exception of two freedom-loving nations: the Poles and the Serbs.

To place Polish literature of this time in a proper perspective is a task that has never been brought to a conclusion. A jungle of criss-crossing currents, of madly daring ideas, of self-pity and national arrogance, and of unsurpassed brilliancy in poetic technique asks for constantly renewed explorations. If the term Romanticism is treacherous, denoting as it does different phenomena in each country, it would be doubly dangerous to apply its most widely accepted meaning to Polish literature. The struggle against the classical rules of good taste, which began in Poland (as in France) around 1820, concealed, from its inception, political undertones. Contrary to the brand of Romanticism which in many countries was identified with a withdrawal of the individual into his own interior world, Romanticism in Poland acquired an extremely activist character and was clearly a consequence of many ideas of the Enlightenment. Perhaps, after all, Prince Metternich, an archreactionary, an evil demon for the progressive intelligentsia of his time, gave the best definition of the new ferment in his secret memorandum written for Czar Alexander I in 1820:

The progress of the human mind has been extremely rapid in the course of the last three centuries. This progress having been accelerated more rapidly than the growth of wisdom (the only counterpoise to passions and to errors), a revolution prepared by the false systems, the fatal errors into which many of the most illustrious sovereigns of the last half of the eighteenth century fell, has at last broken out in a country [France] advanced in knowledge, and enervated by pleasure, in a country inhabited by people whom one can only regard as frivolous, from the facility with which they comprehend and the difficulty they experience in judging calmly.

In what, according to Prince Meternich, does the evil of modern time consist?

This evil may be described in one word—presumption; the natural effect of the rapid progression of the human mind toward the perfecting of so many things. This it is which at the present day leads so many individuals astray, for it has become an almost universal sentiment.

Religion, morality, legislation, economy, politics, administration, all have become common and accessible to everyone. Knowledge seems to come by inspiration; experience has no value for the presumptuous man; faith is nothing to him; he substitutes for it a pretended individual conviction, and to arrive at this conviction, dispenses with all inquiry and with all study; for these means appear too trivial to a mind which believes itself strong enough to embrace at one glance all questions and all facts. Laws have no values for him, because he has not contributed to make them, and it would be beneath a man of his parts to recognize the limits traced by rude and ignorant generations. Power resides in himself; why should he submit to that which was only useful for the man deprived of light and knowledge? That which, according to him, was required in an age of weakness cannot be suitable in an age of reason and vigor, amounting to universal perfection, which the German innovators designate by the idea, absurd in itself, of the Emancipation of the People! Morality itself he does not attack openly, for without it he could not be sure for a single moment of his own existence; but he interprets its essence after his own fashion, and allows every other person to do so likewise provided that other person neither kills nor robs him.

In thus tracing the character of the presumptuous man, we believe we have traced that of the society of the day, composed of like elements, if the denomination of society is applicable to an order of things which only tends in principle towards individualizing all the elements of which society is composed.

Presumption makes every man the guide of his own belief, the arbiter of laws according to which he is pleased to govern himself or to allow someone else to govern him and his neighbors; it makes him, in short, the sole judge of his own faith, his own action, and the principles according to which he guides them.

Metternich's memorandum could have been presented to the police for use as a miniature handbook on rebel psychology. But he gives more detailed advice too, being perspicacious enough to notice the multifaceted philosophical, literary, and political character of Romanticism:

The real aim of the idealists of the party is religious and political fusion, and this being analyzed is nothing else but creating in favor of each individual an existence entirely independent of all authority, or any other will than his own, an idea absurd and contrary to the nature of man, and incompatible with the need of human society . . . . It is principally the middle classes of society which this moral gangrene has affected, and it is only among them that the real heads of the party are found.

If we keep in mind that the authority so praised by Metternich was, for the Polish rebels, a foreign authority, opposed to their patriotic feelings, we receive a portrait that delineates perfectly the nature of Romanticism in Poland.

A constant preoccupation with postulated political change explains the fondness Polish Romantics displayed for the philosophy of history. Their themes were elaborated sometimes in opposition to, sometimes in agreement with, Hegelian thought. In any case, Polish Romanticism was thoroughly imbued with historicism. One more observation should be made: though Shelley called the poet a lawgiver for humanity, few people in England, we may suspect, took that claim seriously. As a consequence of national misfortunes, the reading public in Poland gave literal acceptance to a similar claim on the part of their own poets. The poet was hailed as a charismatic leader, the incarnation of the collective strivings of the peoples; thus, his biography, not only his work, entered the legend. We may guess that a transference of the Napoleonic myth of a "providential man" into the realm of literature was at work here. Among foreign writers, no one more fully than Lord Byron, as a poet and a man of action, filled these deep emotional needs. Byron's fame in his native country was insignificant if we compare it with the near worship surrounding him in the Slavic countries. The three Polish Romantic poets, Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Zygmunt Krasiński, were acclaimed as national bards, and these greatly magnified figures dominated several literary generations—a somewhat arbitrary triad, as they were not all writers of equal talent.

CLASSICISM AND PRE-ROMANTICISM

During the first two decades of the century, Warsaw dictated literary fashions. As in France, the classical principles of good taste were still the rule, not only in literature but also in theater and in the fine arts. There was a marked division into high-brow and low-brow genres. Poetry and versified drama (submitted to rigorous rules) belonged to the former class; while the sentimental novels and "bourgeois dramas" gradually invading the market were ranged in the latter. The bourgeois drama originated in Germany, and the most disparate works, starting with the so-called "horrible products of a sick imagination" like Schiller's The Robbers and ending with the prolific and shallow production of Kotzebue, were lumped together under this label. The Warsaw literati for a while successfully blocked the influx of such suspect novelties, which offended their rationalism and classical tastes. The classicists organized themselves into a "Society of X's" (Towarzystwo Iksó w) and held gatherings where literary works and new plays staged in Warsaw were discussed. To exert pressure as a body, all of them signed their articles of criticism with an X. Perhaps the most important member of the X's was Kajetan Koźmian (1771-1856), a rich landowner, a senator, a poet, a translator, and a very active participant, as were all his colleagues, in the Society of the Friends of Learning. An excellent craftsman of late classical or, as it is sometimes called derogatorily, "pseudoclassical" Polish verse, Koźmian still makes pleasant reading, but his fate exemplifies the difficulties of writers who follow a moribund trend. For nearly twenty-five years, he worked on a long descriptive poem, Polish Husbandry (Ziemiaństwo polskie), comparable to Delille's imitations of Virgil's Georgics and composed in impeccable couplets; but by the time it was ready, works of that type were considered old-fashioned bores. Besides; Koźmian with his conservative and legitimist views and his extremely violent denunciations of Romanticism (much in the spirit of Metternich) made enemies for himself out of the young generation and was ridiculed by Mickiewicz as "an author of a thousand lines on planting peas."

Another luminary of the Society of X's was Ludwik Osiński (1775-1838), the author of graceful odes, a literary critic, for a while director of the Warsaw Theater, and a professor of literature at Warsaw University. More tolerant and open-minded than Koźmian, he acknowledged some literary value in the Germans of the Sturm und Drang period, commented favorably upon the brothers Schlegel, and even moderately praised Shakespeare. Franciszek Ksawery Dmochowski (1762-1808), . . . adapter of Boileau, translator of the Iliad and of Milton, died in Napoleonic Warsaw; but his son, Franciszek Salezy Dmochowski (1801-1871), became one of the most zealous defenders of the classical status quo. Stanisław Kostka Potocki (1752-1821) exemplifies another aspect of the period. The Warsaw literati, though accused by the young of undue respect for the established order, were, in fact, loyal inheritors of the Voltairian spirit. They directed their malice at superstitions, prejudices, and human folly much like their Enlightenment predecessors. They differed from them in renouncing larger political strivings. Potocki, minister of education in the Congress Kingdom of Poland, a fervent Freemason, a supporter of the Society of the Friends of Learning, and one of the X's, wrote a kind of satirical novel which he had to publish anonymously, so violent was its attack on the clergy. The novel was entitled A Journey to Dunceville (Podróż do Ciemnogrodu, 1820), and to our day ciemnogró d in Polish has served to denote people of ultra-conservative views.

The Warsaw literati were particularly concerned with the theater. They dreamed of writing tragedies in verse (a genre also honored by Voltaire) and took for the greatest authorities such French codifiers of rules (for the neoclassical tragedy) as Jean François La Harpe (1739-1803). To understand what they were looking for in that genre, one may use the example of the most famous French painter of the Napoleonic era, Louis David. His was a painting of costume and gesture, where Frenchmen appeared as ancient Romans, or if specifically modern situations were celebrated (as, for example, in his large canvas, "The Death of Marat"), the characters were transformed into figures of an ancient tragedy. The Polish classicists believed that the fusion of contents taken from local history with rigorous, French-inspired form would result in a new literary genre, a national tragedy. For this reason they gave unreserved applause to Alojzy Feliński (1771-1820). A poet, a translator, a veteran of Koś ciuszko's uprising, and later on a professor of literature at the lycée of Krzemieniec, Feliński wrote a tragedy in verse, Barbara Radziwiłł (Barbara Radziwiłłó wna), in 1817 and even translated into French and German. The author's metrical inventiveness, without breaking out of thirteen-syllable rhymed couplets, proved itself within that framework. He used various combinations consisting either in parallelism between syntax and line or in anticlimaxes (for instance, a sentence broken by a caesura), etc. For his subject, Feliński chose a historical event of the sixteenth century. (As we have already remarked, the Poles turned toward their Golden Age as a kind of compensation.) The event, famous in its time and, for that reason, recorded copiously in literature, was not unlike the affair of Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson in the twentieth century: the crown prince of Poland, son of King Sigismund I and the Italian princess, Bona Sforza, clandestinely married Barbara Radziwiłł, the daughter of a Lithuanian lord, but not of royal parentage. After the death of his father, when the prince was to ascend the throne as Sigismund August, violent opposition was voiced from the Senate—a demand was made that he either divorce his wife or abdicate. The leader of the anti-Radziwiłł faction was the queen mother, Bona. With great difficulty, the young king overcame innumerable intrigues, finally receiving the consent of the Diet to crown his wife, when suddenly, after a short illness, Barbara died. According to popular legend, since Bona was a vicious woman, skillful like all Renaissance Italians in the methods of poison and the dagger, she must have poisoned Barbara. This moving story of the royal love and despair of a king, who in his grief supposedly turned to a magician promising to show him the phantom of his beloved, acted powerfully upon popular imagination. Feliński studied historical documents, but to preserve the three unities he distilled a sort of extract, departing somewhat from facts and dates. He constructed a tragedy of conflict between passion and civic duty. As the action rises, the king is more and more cornered and at the climax finds three possibilities left to him: a civil war (his opponents are ready to attack the royal castle in Krakó w), abdication (which for him would be a cowardly act), or divorce. He makes a very curious and very Polish decision: to avoid pressures from the lords in the Senate and to avert a civil war, he appeals to the Diet and promises to accept its verdict. But his victory in the Diet is turned to nothing when Barbara dies, poisoned. Throughout the five acts neither the passions of the king nor those of Barbara occupy the foreground, and the vicious Bona is perhaps the most vivid character. Contrasting figures of lords—one backs the king, another leads the rebels because of his anarchistic ambitions, still another is primarily concerned with the interests of the state as a whole—make us think of Kochanowski's The Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys.

The success of Feliński's play came at the time when Niemcewicz's Historical Songs (published in 1816) was at the peak of its popularity. The national past thus began its career as a legitimate subject for both poetry and drama. In Russia too, Kondraty Ryleyev, indebted in this respect to Niemcewicz, whom he translated, attempted between 1821 and 1823 to write a kind of lyrical history of Russia from the tenth century to the nineteenth century in a series of dumy, singing of such personalities as Oleg, Sviatoslav, Dimitry of the Don, Ivan Suzanin. He drew his themes from Karamzin's History of Russia, but made near rebels out of his heroes (for instance, the troops of Dimitry of the Don in the fourteenth century want to fight "for freedom, truth, and law").

The new Romantic fashions made their entrance slowly; at first they were visible only in low-brow genres, but some respected French writers also contributed to the opening of forbidden paths. Le Tourneur was the first to translate the collected works of Shakespeare into French (though he did it in prose), and in his preface he introduced the word romantique:

Whoever will want to know him [Shakespeare] let him direct his gaze on the vast sea or fix it on the aerial and romantique landscape.

So what is the meaning of romantique? Paintings of Salvador Rosa, landscapes of the Alps, untrimmed English gardens, and Shakespeare—"everything which awakens in a moved soul tender affections and melancholy ideas." Next, Jean-François Ducis rewrote Le Tourneur's version in verse, diluting Shakespeare with a sentimentalist's melancholy sweetness and expurgating all "coarseness" and "nonsense" (there is no Iago in Othello, for instance, because the public could not have borne such a horror of villainy; and the names of characters are changed to add a Nordic flavor: Desdemona and Brabancio become Hedelmona and Odalbert). In Poland then, Shakespeare was played according to Ducis or according to a German translator, Schröder (in whose version of Hamlet, the protagonist does not die). But the Polish literary public soon discovered true Shakespeare through an excellent German translation by August Wilhelm Schlegel. In addition, Schlegel's Vienna lectures on "Dramatic Art and Literature," published in 1809-1811, served the innovators in Warsaw as their chief weapon against pseudoclassical views on drama. The theoretical principles of Romanticism were elaborated in Germany and spread all over Western Europe by Madame de Staël, whose book, On Germany (De l'Allemagne), had its first edition of 1810 completely destroyed at Napoleon's orders—Madame de Staël being his staunch enemy. By 1813, the year of its second edition, On Germany had won acclaim in Poland.

Among the writers on the border line of Classicism and Romanticism, we should place Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, whose knowledge of English gave him direct access not only to the works of Pope and Samuel Johnson, but to those of Gray and Byron as well as to English and Scottish ballads. Another such transitional figure was Kazimierz Brodziński (1791-1835), a poet and a professor at Warsaw University. In 1818 he came out with a long treatise, On Classicism and Romanticism (O klasycznoś ci i romantycznoś ci), accompanied by an essay, "On the Spirit of Polish Poetry." Well-read in German philosophy, Brodziński took from Johann Gottfried Herder the idea of a specific national character expressing itself in every given literature. Moderate in his judgments, he tried to see advantages in both currents and to combine them in such a way as to remain true to what he called the "essence of Polish poetry." He came to the conclusion that the idyll is the truest expression of the Polish national character. In his poetic practice, he attempted to apply that principle, particularly in his idyll, Wiesław (1820), where he depicts somewhat too happy Polish peasants. Brodziński's moderation not only failed to satisfy the young, but provoked the anger of the classicists. It was against him that an eminent professor of the University of Wilno, Jan Śniadecki, a mathematician, an astronomer, and a rationalist, wrote his essay, On Classical and Romantic Writings (1819), in which he called Romanticism "a school of treason and plague," a danger for education and the purity of the language. Sniadecki was one of the brightest minds of his time, and his words should not be taken lightly. Yet he had to lose. Not only foreign imports, such as the poems of Ossian (treated as genuine Nordic songs) and sentimental novels, were promoting the change in sensibility. The novel form was already being imitated by Polish authors: the most successful of such works was Malvina, or Intuitions of the Heart (Malwina czyli domyślność serca, 1816), by Princess Maria Wirtemberska, née Czartoryska. Perhaps the most important single phenomenon that determined the shift was the Napoleonic legend, releasing as it did new forces of feeling and imagination. Viewed in this light, Polish Romanticism came close to resembling that branch of French Romanticism which was represented by Stendhal. The poetry and prose produced by those who had served in the Napoleonic army was, thanks to their energy and broad vistas, far removed from the placid offerings of the Warsaw literati; this is apparent, for instance, in a poem by Cyprian Godebski, "To the Polish Legions in Italy" ("Wiersz do Legiów polskich," 1805). It is visible in a novel by the same author, A Grenadier Philosopher (Grenadier filozof, 1805), where we have a story of Polish and French soldiers wandering from Italy through France, sharing a common disillusionment with the ideals which the French Revolution failed to bring to fruition. Besides, the conviction was growing that poetry is not just a matter of good taste as prescribed by the educated classes. While German theoreticians extolled the Nordic genius in opposition to the French classical genius, Polish writers began to realize the value of Slavic folklore. In this respect, the role of Zorjan Dołłga-Chodakowski (pen name of Adam Czarnocki—1784-1825) should be remembered. A self-taught ethnographer and archaeologist, he was responsible for collections of folk songs from Poland, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine.