The greatest poet of the age, Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), was a case in point. A student at Wilno University, Mickiewicz had started out writing lyrical works. In 1822 he published Ballads and Romances, which earned him critical acclaim, and in the following year Grażyna and part of Forefathers’ Eve. The first is a tale of selfsacrifice and honour culled from historical folklore, the second a dramatic work based on the pagan Lithuanian custom of invoking the dead on All Souls’ Eve, which presents a series of tortured souls recounting their errors and sufferings. In the same year Mickiewicz was imprisoned. He was exiled to St Petersburg, and in 1825 to Odessa, where he wrote Crimean Sonnets. In Odessa he shared a mistress with the chief of police for southern Russia, who secured him a transfer back to Moscow. There he made friends with a number of Russian writers including Pushkin and came to understand, and to fear more than ever, the nature of the Russian state. It was in 1828 that he published, in Konrad Wallenrod, his first overtly political poem.
This historical tale about a Lithuanian child captured by the Teutonic Knights and brought up as one of them, rising to the Grand Mastership of the Order and then leading its armies to defeat at the hands of his own people, explores the idea of patriotic action through collaboration with the enemy. In the third part of Forefathers’ Eve (1832), Mickiewicz touched on the whole range of moral and ethical problems confronting the Poles in captivity, and on the questions of good and evil in political life.
In 1834 he published Pan Tadeusz, a mock-heroic evocation of country life in Lithuania. Written in Paris at a time when Mickiewicz had already condemned the values of the Commonwealth and was leaning heavily towards the left of émigré politics, it could hardly be more telling. As they searched for answers to present problems, such men could not avoid hankering for the past. The quest for the lost state of innocence, present in Polish literature from the sixteenth century, was becoming inextricably confused with the quest of the lost motherland, or rather, the state of being that had vanished with it. For the émigrés in particular, Arcadia became indistinguishable from Poland.
At the same time, Mickiewicz concerned himself with the plight of all those, languishing in prison or exile, who suffered for their cause in an apparently indifferent world. In The Books of the Polish Nation (1832) he suggested that Poland had been crucified in the cause of righteousness. The crucifixion would expiate the political sins of the world and lead to resurrection. This messianic image gave hope. Christ too had cried out on the Cross and had been answered with silence, but by His death He had conquered death itself. Through their sacrifice the Poles would conquer persecution.
Few were naive enough to take this literally, but at some level of the subconscious the messianic vision was a healing balm for every suffering Polish soul, which instinctively rejected a reality that excluded its aspirations. Nor were they exceptional in this: both Mazzini and the French historian Jules Michelet also developed visions of Italy and France respectively redeeming the world through their own crucifixion. It was not so much a question of escapism, as a search for a deeper truth.
The philosopher Bronisław Trentowski (1808-69), a pupil of Hegel, evolved a national philosophy of action and attempted to produce a practical programme for the ‘regeneration’ of Poland. Very close to him was the remarkable figure of Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński (1776-1853). Bafflingly, he fought for Kościuszko at Maciejowice, served on Suvorov’s staff and in Dąbrowski’s legions within the space of four years. He settled in France, where in 1804 he had a vision of ‘the absolute’, and published a vast corpus of work, some of it purely mathematical, but most of it devoted to restructuring the relationship between science and life. He tried to elaborate a system of history in which the fate of Poland played a seminal part.
In 1848 Mickiewicz went to Rome to raise a Polish legion, whose uniform was marked by a large cross. While it battled against the Austrians in Lombardy, he returned to Paris to edit the international socialist periodical La Tribune des Peuples. A devout if at times rebellious Christian, Mickiewicz kept trying to arrive at a synthesis of Christian Socialism and to construct a programme of action which fitted the historical moment.
