Mickiewicz as a proto-feminist
In 1829, Odyniec wrote a letter to Juliusz Korsak, the poet and translator, Mickiewicz’s colleague from his student days at Vilnius University: ‘These days, he is busy writing a most unusual work titled “Historya przyszłości”. He is writing it in French and has already written more than 30 pages’, Odyniec begins, admitting that he reviewed them ‘only in passing’. ‘It’s a wonderful thing!’ – he points out and adds that if Mickiewicz ‘completes it as he has begun, it will perhaps one day be the Don Quixote of his time’. According to Odyniec, Mickiewicz wanted to ‘present the anticipated consequences of the material egoism and egoistical rationalism which the present world embraces’, and he intended to do this by depicting them
in the fates of whole nations, juxtaposing side by side the highest peak of material civilisation and the lowest fall of emotion, spirit and faith – notabene [sic], only in men. For although women have already been completely emancipated and equalled in all rights with men, they still cannot banish these ‘old superstitions’ and, constituting the ‘lower house’ in parliamentary deliberations, they also constitute the only opposition and dam […] against what the men’s house calls ‘pure reason’, condemning all emotion.
Women, perceived by the bard in an essentialist manner, were thus to stand on the side of ‘emotion and faith’, while men were to be the advocates of rational forces. Mickiewicz’s approach, although immobilising women in the role of messengers of the heart (sensitivity, immateriality, etc.), can be described as proto-feminist – in his vision, women were to be in charge of the ethical transformation of civilisation. Moreover, it was the ‘heroine from the land of the Vistula’ that Mickiewicz saw in his Historia przyszłości as a figure standing at the head of an army of women and ‘twenty-year-old youths’ who would fend off the ‘Chinese invasion’ of Europe. Did Mickiewicz locate in the figure of the female commander a belief in the future victory of ‘emotion, spirit and faith’ over the reason that condemns them?
From today’s perspective, it is surprising that the author foresaw the imperial power of China, which, at the time when Historia przyszłości was being written, was not a powerful country at all (‘China at that time was not strong politically and was dependent on England’, noted Andrzej Niewiadowski, the author of the Leksykon polskiej literatury fantastycznonaukowej [Lexicon of Polish Science Fiction]). The battle described was to conclude the first part of Historia przyszłości, the plot of which Mickiewicz set – according to Odyniec – in the first two centuries of the third millennium.