Culture and Politics in Eastern Europe-Two Articles The Polish Spark
SEGEI, HAROLD B.
Culture & Politics in East Europe—Two Articles The Polish Spark By Harold B. Segel If the conditions are ripe, a single spark grows into a conflagration. Angry discontent over the slow pace of...
...Finding the town and his teaching assignment equally dull, he left the position after a year to return to the richer life he had left behind in Wilno...
...Forefathers' Eve, Part III, is a poetic-dramatic record of that personal metamorphosis...
...This involved discussions of German idealistic philosophy, and the writing and underground circulation of manuscripts—above all poetry—dedicated to ending tyrannies...
...That is not true, though, of Forefathers' Eve, Part III...
...I shall be free—yes, and full well I know, The sort of grace the Muscovite will show Striking the fetters from my feet and hands To rivet on my spirit heavier bands...
...Mickiewicz had also felt the heavy hand of political repression in his youth, and he made these experiences the subject of Forefathers' Eve...
...With thou dost glow like clouds that wander high Yet know not what they do nor where they fly...
...Sharp applause at lines construed as relevant to contemporary Polish conditions in plays both classical and modem, foreign and domestic, is hardly a novelty...
...What was Mickiewicz's reason for this exaggeration...
...Granted, the charges against the youths were largely unfounded, the sentences imposed in a few cases were harsh, and there may have been instances of maltreatment...
...For Mickiewicz, who had meanwhile made his literary debut with two volumes of poems in 1822 and 1823, the exile from November 1824 to May 1829 was far from a hardship...
...A satellite Poland stood at the brink once more in October 1956, when restraint on one side and concession on the other concluded the drama before the de-noument was reached—as it was in Hungary...
...The silent recollection or applause of protest that the play evokes is determined by the reality beyond the theater...
...The emotional impact o?such lines on Polish audiences tends to blur certain essential facts about Forefathers' Eve...
...The single spark which actually ignited this tinderbox of discontent was a production of the 19th-century Polish drama, Forefathers' Eve (Dziady), by the romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855...
...Except for the title and a mechanically appended ninth scene—the poet's way of suggesting a continuity of his thought and work from 1823 to the Dresden period—folklore gives way completely to a drama based on the arrest, imprisonment, trial and sentencing of the Wilno youths...
...One of you, in chains, by thought alone Can overturn or raise the loftiest throne...
...Add to this the widespread unpopularity of Warsaw's official position on the Middle East conflict, and the hostile reaction to insinuations about a potential "internal enemy" or "Fifth Column" (read here, regrettably, Jews...
...Similarly, the imposition of official bans is a ticklish matter in the case of modern Polish literature, which has continually questioned the viability of traditional values...
...Then the oppressor was not a Polish government, for none existed...
...A partitioned Poland experienced it in November 1830, and in Jan-nary 1863...
...Rather, his intention was to enlarge the significance of the event, to envelop it with the aura of a national calamity comparable at least to the 1830 Uprising...
...Indeed, Polish writers have always been more generous in their treatment of other nationalities than their Russian counterparts...
...Yet if this was the immediate purpose of Forefathers' Eve, it is lost in the emotional tension raised by the play...
...Kowno...
...The play was, therefore, a requisite establishment of credentials before Mickiewicz could begin addressing his fellow Poles as a wieszcz with any reasonable hope of their heeding him...
...In the decisive Dresden period of his life Mickiewicz came to believe that he was destined to fulfill himself not merely as a poet—that he was already—but as a national bard, a wieszcz, entrusted with the spiritual leadership of his people...
...It was there that news rsached him of the November 1830 Warsaw insurrection of Polish cadets...
...a surfacing of frustration rooted in the hopes of October 1956 and aggravated by the progress observed in other East European states?Hungary, Rumania, Czechoslovakia...
...Thousands of his countrymen—soldiers, intellectuals, prominent figures in the revolutionary government—were streaming westward in what the Poles call the Great Emigration, and Mickiewicz met them on their way through Prussia...
...Yet it should be stressed that the play is not a political diatribe, nor was it motivated primarily by a desire to incite anti-Russian sentiment...
...The episode was unnecessary and politically motivated, but isolated—it was far from being part of a "final solution" to a "Polish problem...
...The anti-Russianism of 19th-and early 20th-century Polish culture posed no problem for the regime in the past...
...Didst thou but know that o'er each thought of thine There wait, as earth and air await the thunder, Demons and angels held in breathless wonder...
...it was Russian autocracy...
...The long narrative monologues recalling the brutal treatment of the Wilno youths by the Russian authorities, the unflattering portrait of the head of the Russian investigating commission, and the satire of Polish lickers of Russian boots paint a grim picture of a Poland prostrate beneath the Russian heel...
...Leaving Russia in 1829, Mickiewicz travelled around Western Europe, finally settling in Rome...
...He was kept under police surveillance, to be sure, but his reputation as man of letters had preceded him, insuring an exile considerably mollified by literary soirees, the friendship of prominent Russian literary figures (among them Pushkin), affairs of the heart, and extensive travel in European Russia and the Crimea...
...Disturbed by a crisis of conscience over his failure to reach the fighting, the poet settled among the emigres in Dresden, where in 1832 he composed Forefathers' Eve, Part III...
...They say that then they waged such monstrous strife, They did not spare the foe his forest trees And burned the grain still ripening in the ear...
...Still, for the poet to speak of persecution, let alone to imply a policy of genocide, is unwarranted...
...Were he alive today, Mickiewicz would doubtless be gratified at the thought of a popular student movement against official repression seizing his Forefathers' Eve as its focus and initiating demonstrations around his statues in Warsaw, Cracow, and Poznan...
...By the time he arrived at the Russo-Prussian border, the revolt had already been crushed...
...Satan himself has taught him how to destroy...
...An admiration tinged with envy has been aroused by the resurgence in those countries of a nationalism that demands, first of all, greater autonomy from the Soviet Union...
...They have also cemented the bonds between Poland and the Soviet Union, whose history of mutual relations is a centuries-old plaint of fear, suspicion and hatred...
...Esteemed as the greatest Polish poet of his time...
...In designating his drama Forefathers' Eve, Part III, Mickiewicz was borrowing a title from two of his works published in 1S23: Forefathers' Eve, Parts II and IV...
...Against this stylized background, the poet spun a tale of unrequited love culminating in madness and suicide very much reminiscent of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther...
...But the events of a little more than a decade have eroded the restraint and defined the concession on the narrowest possible terms...
...The indictment of Russian tyranny—or tyranny in any form—holds the audience tightly in its grip...
...Several of them, including Mickiewicz, were sentenced to exile in Russia...
...The tyranny under attack was Tsarist Russia, and the Poles usually distinguished between the despised autocracy and a basically warmhearted, likeable people...
...This marked the first time the play had ever fallen under the official ban of a Polish government...
...The current unrest in Poland is Harold B. Segel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Literatures at Columbia...
...Starting from the basic facts of the Wilno episode, Mickiewicz employed visions, mystic trances, messianic utterances and supernatural powers to portray the spiritual transformation of a young romantic into a national poet-seer (in Polish, wieszcz) whose soul united with his nation's: Now is my soul incarnate in my country And in my body dwells her soul...
...My fatherland and 1 are one great whole...
...And the Polish feeling of intellectual superiority has only sharpened the antagonism toward a stand-still regime for whom excuses can no longer be found...
...For example, with notably few exceptions Polish literature is free of the anti-Semitism that underlines the treatment of Jewish characters in Russian fiction...
...On January 30, authorities imposed a ban on further performances of the play in Warsaw's National Theater...
...And students vented their hatrea of political injustices not by mass public demonstrations or the destruction of property but impassioned clandestine intellectual activity...
...The exaggerated nature of Mickiewicz's account was not rooted in a desire to whip his readers into an emotional frenzy over Russian atrocities in partitioned Poland (the play wasn't even performed during his lifetime...
...What was objected to in the play...
...When the banned production of Forefathers' Eve, directed by the talented Kazimierz Dejmek, opened at the National Theater in Warsaw a few months ago, the play evoked a warm audience response that the authorities chose to regard as protest...
...Needless to say, the works are free of any political tendency...
...Estrangement from the intellectuals and students, as well as Poland's firm bonds with the Soviet Union, moved the regime to prohibit further performances of one of the most highly regarded classics in the national repertoire...
...After much hesitancy and soul-searching, the poet decided to return to Russian Poland to take part in the uprising...
...In the years since 1956, however, the theater has been more of an outlet for pent-up emotions than any other institution of Polish life—including, until now, the universities...
...In November 1823, he and a number of his friends were arrested on charges of having organized secret societies and engaged in anti-Russian political plotting...
...For a very politically conscious youth and intelligentsia, the prohibition was further evidence of the extreme conservatism into which the regime had sunk...
...12 The New Leader In the case of Forefathers' Eve, then, it would appeal that the regime was overreacting to a mood it felt impelled to curb...
...After graduating from the University of Wilno in 1819, Mickiewicz took a job as schoolteacher in the other important city of Polish Lithuania...
...So great, moreover, is the historically understandable anti-Russian content of 19th-century Polish literature, that to prohibit classical works on the grounds of this sentiment would be tantamount to repudiating vast areas of national heritage...
...Whether producers stage only the celebrated Part III of the work or an abridged version of all four parts (as is now the tendency), today there is no escaping the impact of the drama of Polish students persecuted under Russian tyranny for no reason other than their love of liberty and fatherland...
...Henceforth his art was to be a commitment to the cause of national regeneration...
...Mention has been made in the Western press of the anti-Russian nature of Forefathers' Eve, Part III...
...By elevating the Wilno episode to the stature of a national calamity, he could show that there had been a time when his own patriotic zeal had brought him persecution and deprivation...
...Many of the lines indeed are inflammable: / have read of wars in ancient, ixeathen days...
...In a nation where patriotism is often measured in blood, Mickiewicz felt an obligation to atone for his failure to suffer for Poland during the November Uprising...
...For the present regime, the audience's reaction to the anti-Russian lines is an embarrassment...
...Forefathers' Eve thus becomes a national drama, perhaps in some respects even a national ritual...
...The ever-present fear of a united irredentist Germany, the seemingly insoluble Church-State conflict, and the steady growth of intellectual audacity have stiffened the inflexibility of an essentially conservative regime...
...The pattern is classic...
...But the romantic apotheosis of the human will proclaimed early in the play must ultimately be perceived as the more profound challenge: O man, didst thou but know how great thy power...
...One thought of thine, like hidden lightning flashing, Through gathered clouds can send the thunder crashing In wasteful storm or pour down fruitful shower...
...Angry discontent over the slow pace of economic progress and unrealized hopes for political reform become the dry timber of revolt and insurrection...
...Despite attempts by the Orthodox Church to suppress them, the rites were still celebrated in some remote parts of Lithuania and Belo-Russia in the early 19th century...
...When the poet emerged from the torment of inner conflict over his ambivalence toward the 1830 insurrection, he identified himself with the Great Emigration, just as the poet of Forefathers' Eve identifies himself with his nation...
...The first is that Mickiewicz's account of the Wilno events should not be taken too literally...
...The play proclaimed his identification with the national struggle and determined the future covirse of his life...
...The Tsar is still more clever and he bleeds Poland more deep: he crushes out the seed...
...Possibly the audience applause at anti-Russian lines...
...These earlier "dramas" (to use the term very loosely), together with the posthumously published fragments of Part 1, are a typical romantic idealization of folk culture, in this case the pagan Belo-Russian rites of ancestor worship...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 7
