Using Our New Leisure
KECSKEMETI, PAUL
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Adam Mickiewicz, Poet of Freedom Adam Mickiewicz, the centenary of whose death was recently commemorated on both sides of the Iron Curtain, is a...
...Now it is a distinguished legal expert or musician...
...But again and again there have been sparks that show that the fire of freedom in Poland has not been extinguished by ten years of terror and propaganda...
...It is easy to imagine how Mickiewicz, a deeply religious if not always orthodox man and a passionate lover of individual liberty, would have felt toward Russia in its Communist incarnation...
...The poet outwitted the Tsar...
...Not that the poet hated Russians as human beings, blindly and indiscriminately...
...Frederick the Great and Catherine II...
...The visitor to the Munich headquarters of Radio Free Europe can see scores of letters, written with typically Polish disregard of consequences, from Poles in Poland who express the warmest enthusiasm for the anti-Communist broadcasts of Radio Free Europe...
...A gallant effort to wipe out the partitions and restore Polish independence was crushed by the superior military force of Tsar Nicholas I. Many thousands of Poles then fled abroad and kept alive the memory of their lost country on foreign soil...
...It would be bard to represent Mickiewicz as a potential member of the "Soviet-Polish Friendship Society...
...Between the lines of Konrad Wallenrod could be sensed the urge to revolt...
...And again there appears the phenomenon of "two Polands...
...But toward the Tsarist aristocracy, the prison-house of conquered peoples, he felt the same implacable detestation as that other great Polish literary figure, Joseph Conrad...
...Polish names appear in almost every movement for freedom, in every war of liberation during the nineteenth century...
...Most Poles, of course, had no choice except to stay in Poland and "coexist...
...His death occurred in Turkey, where he was trying to organize a Polish legion to fight Russia in the Crimean War...
...During his forced residence in Russia he formed many friendships with Russian intellectuals...
...It seemed rather a pity that Archibald MacLeish was assigned such a prominent role in the Mickiewicz celebration at Hunter College...
...There is a tragic similarity between the fate of Poland after 1831 and after the Second World War...
...Now it is the captain of the principal Polish passenger liner, Batory, who "chooses freedom...
...His art was a superb testimonial to the indestructible values of Polish national culture and feeling...
...And when Mickiewicz reached the West he devoted all his energy to the cause of Poland's liberation, finally forsaking his poetry...
...MacLeish's silence at the time of the Yalta betrayal was almost deafening, and during the cold war he struck a somewhat lofty "above the battle" pose which was scarcely in harmony with the burning fighting spirit of Mickiewicz...
...Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, re-enacted, much more brutally, the parts which their crowned predecessors...
...The price of his escape from Russia, where he had been banished from his native Poland, was the dedication of his poem Konrad Wallenrod to Nicholas 1 in a style that Stalin has made familiar in our own time: "Let the name of the Father of so many peoples be praised in all the generations and in all the languages...
...he praised and mourned the Decembrists, the early martyrs of Russian freedom...
...Now it is a young Polish aviator flying a jet plane to the asylum of Denmark...
...Hundreds of thousands of Poles, many of them veterans of the Battle of Britain and of the rugged campaigns in Italy, are now political refugees, scattered all over the world...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Adam Mickiewicz, Poet of Freedom Adam Mickiewicz, the centenary of whose death was recently commemorated on both sides of the Iron Curtain, is a towering figure in Polish literature and history...
...The plebeian dictators of the modern age...
...In his speech, he made an irrelevant attack on the State Department that muddied and confused the issue that should have dominated a memorial to Poland's great poet of freedom: liberation of the Poles and other captive peoples from Soviet tyranny...
...1939 and 1945 were dates of disaster for the independent Poland which had reappeared fter the First World War...
...The Danish critic and man of letters, Ceorg Brandes, in a sympathetic study of Poland published before the First World War, speaks of meeting old Polish soldiers who had fought "wherever they could strike a blow for freedom or against Russia...
...had played in the original partitions of Poland...
...He had chosen the hard road of the uprooted exile himself...
...with their made-in-Moscow government...
...But, despite this jarring note, it was a good thing to see Poles, exiles for freedom and conscience, rallying to the memory of their patriot bard...
...There could, however, be no doubt where the spirit of Mickiewicz was present...
...There were official ceremonies in honor of Adam Mickiewicz in Poland and at the headquarters of the Polish delegation in the UN and unofficial meetings of observance among the new Polish exiles, notably at Hunter College...
...And 1945, while it brought the end of Nazi oppression, clamped down the Communist yoke on Poland...
Vol. 38 • December 1955 • No. 50
