The Autumn of 2024 marks the 200th anniversary of Adam Mickiewicz’s forced departure from his country (6 November 1824). The Polish poet, sentenced by the court of the Russian Empire to settle in Russia, would never return to his homeland. And yet the consequences of that moment would also open a new chapter – both in Mickiewicz’s life and in the history of his global influence.
To commemorate this date in history and celebrate the Poet’s role in Polish and world culture, Adam Mickiewicz Institute has prepared a special online project entitled INFLUENCE. Adam Mickiewicz & Poetry That Acts. It consists of 16 articles – pieced together into a cohesive narrative mapping the international impact of Mickiewicz’s life and work.
The pieces bring to the reader some of the most fascinating cases of Mickiewicz’s reception outside of Poland: his influence on authors and nations of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Jews), as well as in places thousand kilometres away (in the Caucasus, China, Brazil and Crimea).
The author of the project Mikołaj Gliński examines how The Forefathers’ Eve correlated with the Anti-Tsarist poems of Taras Shevchenko, how Pan Tadeusz contributed to the rebirth of modern Lithuanian literature, and how other of Mickiewicz’s works shaped the sense of patriotism of Belarusian writers. He shows how the poem ‘To the Polish Mother’ was read in Brazil through the prism of the slavery, and highlights the relevance of the Crimean Sonnets to the poets whose identity is closely linked to the Ukrainian peninsula. He further explores Mickiewicz’s role as a pioneer of the ‘Petersburg text’ of Russian literature, as well as an ‘imperiologist’ whose political diagnoses regarding the Russian Empire remain topical today.
These stories reveal a thorough, if also widely unreported, influence of Mickiewicz on world literature, showcasing how foreign authors and readers interpreted the work of the Polish poet, drawing inspiration for their own creative work along with finding new formulas of resistance in their fight for cultural values and national independence.
INFLUENCE demonstrates that the aims and values for which Mickiewicz fought throughout his life remain at the very centre of our contemporary world, and that the struggle to protect these values is still fought in front of our eyes in the 21st century. It comes to the surface not only in the mounting resistance to the neoimperial wars of the Russian Federation but also in the form of protest against other anti-freedom movements and colonial oppression around the world.
Mickiewicz’s work and the history of his worldwide reception allow us to better recognise the long-duration and the deep roots of many of our contemporary cultural and sociologigal problems and struggles. They hold a key to the numerous and diverse challenges facing our world today and can help us to grasp, in a new way, the Poet himself and the deeper meaning of his work.
