By the late 1840s the thinking of people such as Mickiewicz and his colleague the poet Juliusz Słowacki (1809-49) was going round in diminishing circles, becoming almost pathological. This was inherent in the conundrum of their predicament, and partly the result of poverty and personal misery. Słowacki dying of tuberculosis in Paris and the poverty-stricken Mickiewicz supporting seven children and a wife who had lost her senses could not be expected to take anything but an embittered view.
More aristocratic Poles grouped around the Czartoryski faction, which functioned like a kind of court in the magnificent Hôtel Lambert in Paris, and those artists who, like Chopin, were able to find a place in the mainstream of European culture and social life, were spared such extremes of suffering, and were therefore able to take a more balanced position. Of the three major Romantic poets Zygmunt Krasiński (1812-59) stood out in this respect. He was christened Napoleon Stanisław Zygmunt by his father, a general in the Grande Armée, but the first of these names was dropped as the general became a prominent reactionary in the Congress Kingdom and a trusted servant of the Tsar. The boy’s life at school was marred by the unpopularity of his father, and he was eventually sent to complete his studies in Geneva. It was there that the outbreak of the 1830 rising found him. He was painfully torn between the desire to join his fellows in the rising and obedience to his father in St Petersburg, who forbade it.
While most Poles viewed the situation in terms of national oppression, and socialists as a struggle between revolution and reaction, Krasiński saw it in a different light. To him, the political status quo amounted to a dishonest and morally indefensible inversion of reality, which turned Russia into the guardian of legitimacy and lent Prussia a civilising mission to oppress Poland. The three powers had, by sleight of hand, turned the Polish cause into a revolutionary one, and the Austrian chancellor Metternich tried to convince the world that the Polish cause ‘does not declare war on the monarchies which possess Polish territory, it declares war on all existing institutions and proclaims the destruction of all the common foundations which form the basis of society’.
To Krasiński, the Russian system was, as he put it in a letter to Pope Pius IX, ‘a huge merciless machine, working by night and by day, crushing thousands of hearts and minds every minute…the irreconcilable enemy of all spiritual independence’. It was the bureaucratic apparatus of the police state that was the real enemy of European civilisation, and it was all the more dangerous for masquerading as its champion, since it perversely encouraged and strengthened the forces of revolution, which were equally destructive. He saw Poland as the only possible counterbalance to both. ‘To make Poland a free, constitutional, moderate state would be to save her, and with her the world,’ he explained in a letter to Louis-Philippe’s minister François Guizot. ‘It would at one stroke kill all the wild hopes of the Tsars and the destructive hopes of the demagogues, whose very real power is based on the profound and hideous injustice of the present European system.’
He was, ultimately, arguing the cause of the anti-statist values of the Commonwealth. In a remarkable play he wrote at this time,
If Krasiński’s perception was cooler than that of his peers, he lacked the conviction that sustained Mickiewicz to his bitter end, brought on by cholera in Turkey in 1855 while attempting to raise a Jewish force for the liberation of Palestine. Krasiński could see no promise in any programme. He too went through a phase of messianic exaltation: ‘Where there is pain, there is life, there is resurrection,’ he wrote to Słowacki. Ultimately, the poets and the philosophers had to admit that there was no answer to the Polish Question—no political answer and no spiritual answer. It remained a question of faith and hope. The only thing the Poles could do was to cling to their Polishness. Not their patriotism or their political hopes for the resurrection of Poland, but quite simply the state of mind of Polishness. As Krasiński exclaimed in his last major poem,
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