Inventing Anti-Imperial Poetic Discourse: Adam Mickiewicz and Taras Shevchenko, with Alexander Pushkin in the Tsar's Shadow

mickiewicz_and_shewczhenko_under_the_bronze_horseman_-_collage.jpeg, default, Adam Mickiewicz and Taras Shevchenko under the statue of Peter the Great. Painting by Vasily Surikov in public domain; collage: Janek Twardowski., center, #000000

#language & literature

How a poetic power clash between the great poets Mickiewicz and Pushkin – far from the friendship touted later – reveals an anti-colonial literary tradition of political resistance in Eastern Europe. Along with Taras Shevchenko's relevance in this 200-year-old poetic strife, and how it all still matters today.

In the autumn of 1832, Adam Mickiewicz, recently released after several years spent in Russia, published what turned out to be his ultimate masterpiece: the revolutionary political drama Forefathers’ Eve, Part III. The work, forbidden 'unconditionally' in the Russian Empire for the next century, became definitive for Mickiewicz and an apt summation – and, if you care, a prophecy – of the fate and tragedy of Poles in the face of Russian autocracy, with its brutal repressions and Russification. The idiosyncratic and multi-dimensional work contains a final series of poems whose historical and political significance, and potential for building anti-imperial and anti-colonial discourse in Eastern Europe and across the Empire, goes far beyond 19th century Poland.

What follows is a look at this breakthrough sequence of poems, titled Ustęp (traditionally called in English 'Digression'), which captured Russia’s imperial regime in the making, and an attempt to gauge the unobvious role this sequence came to play in the history of Eastern European literature in striving for freedom. Digression’s immediate influence extends from Alexander Pushkin to Taras Shevchenko, and beyond – a tradition which remains relevant today.

What Mickiewicz Saw in Russia

Thumbnail — Witold Pruszkowski, 'March to Siberia', 1893, photo: Lviv National Art Gallery

The seven powerful poems of Digression, like all of Forefathers' Eve, Part III, are deeply rooted in Adam Mickiewicz’s experience of being deported to Russia, after his arrest and conviction in 1823 as part of the so-called Philomaths trial in Vilnius. In its aftermath, Mickiewicz spent several years in Russia as a special prisoner of the Tsar, gaining unique, first-hand knowledge of the Empire and its dealings. This knowledge, which Mickiewicz could hardly reveal while still in Russia, found its perfect form in the Digression poems, with the sequence’s unique mix of reportage-like observation, historiosophy and prophecy.

As the poems unfold, we follow Mickiewicz's deportation from Vilnius to the Empire’s northern capital of St. Petersburg. Looking at Russia through Mickiewicz’s eyes, we see a country vast and bleak in its infinitude (‘the barren waste with nowhere to rest’), and yet devoid of visible traces of history or a human past: ‘An open region, white and desolate / A sheaf on which no pen has ever writ’. Even roads spanning these desert wastes are not any time-worn result of a natural human activity, as Mickiewicz notes, but rather a product of imperial will and whim (‘The finger of the Tsar decreed these swaths’). Hence their ultimate application is not that of trade or communication, but the convenience and speed of moving military units:

These march due west, to battle with the north
While southward, to confront Caucasians
March others, although why, and whither sent forth
None of them know (but they know not to ask).

The latter observation introduces one of the key themes of Mickiewicz’s vision of Russia: a lack of subjectivity or agency on the part of subordinates of the Empire. This authoritarian way of exerting power, which transforms also the subjects (‘they know not to ask’), must have come as a strong cultural shock for Mickiewicz – who was shaped by the freedom-loving political tradition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and by Western European Enlightenment ideals of liberty and human rights. Along with other recurrent elements – the ubiquity of corruption, outright thievery, hypocrisy and servility, and the omnipresent principle of knout (the whip) – this surfaces again and again in Mickiewicz’s images of Russia, establishing a dark, grim vision of the imperial regime.

Mickiewicz’s St. Petersburg

In the sequence’s second poem, ‘The Suburbs of the Capital’ (specifically Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar’s summer residence), Mickiewicz notes the local architecture’s artificiality, which strikes him as one huge menagerie of different specimens from European and world architecture (‘All orders present, buildings of all shapes / Like beasts brought here from all the world’s wild ranges / Giraffe and bison, crocodiles and apes / Exhibited in individual cages’). Much in the fashion of post-colonial critique, Mickiewicz recognizes the imitative character of Russian imperial culture, which mimics outer shapes but not the meanings or functions of Western inventions, whether in buildings, institutions or ideas.

This lack of connection with local tradition and the superficial character of the imitation strikes the poet as particularly appalling. It is as if everything he sees in that city was, in the words of scholar Ewa Thompson, author of Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism, ‘[e]ither borrowed or bought for the money the Russians managed to steal from other nations’. In fact, Mickiewicz is very well aware of the economic underpinnings of the imperial splendour around him: ‘These castles – of the lackeys of the Tsar / Arose from the torrent of our tears and blood,’ he writes. And proceeds to enumerate:

Text

The blood of Litwa, the tears of Ukraine,
The gold of Poland were all spent to buy
All that Paris or London might contain,
All that the world of fashion might codify;

Author

Adam Mickiewicz, ‘The Suburbs of the Capital,’ translated by Charles Kraszewski

In the third poem, ‘Petersburg’, Mickiewicz finally reaches the capital. While struck by the new city’s magnitude, he is also drawn to its ‘un-natural’ origins: Peter the Great’s purely whimsical will to build a new capital in a marshy place, utterly inhospitable to human life, the construction of which used forced labor and cost perhaps a hundred thousand peasant lives. ‘It was the Tsar’s command / That bade the city (not theirs, his) to stand / To his All-mighty whim a monument,’ Mickiewicz claims. These grim origins as well as the magnitude and scale of the city lead the poet to a dramatic conclusion that the Russian capital was built by… Satan.

In its streets, Mickiewicz’s careful eye – as if that of a contemporary reporter – discerns foreign names on house signs. His suggestion: these foreigners are here for money and are complicit in consolidating the regime. In another satirical image, he depicts a stroll taken by the Tsar and his entourage along the Neva River’s embankment on a wintry cold early afternoon. No one talks, no one enjoys themselves… and the moment the Tsar leaves – everyone else also disappears. It’s a vain display, where everything and everyone is there for the Tsar. Again, this strangest of social gatherings is a caricature of Western traditions, just as the whole city is an imitation or a mock version of European capitals: Paris, Amsterdam, Rome or Venice. Once more, Mickiewicz indicates the facade-like nature of Russian modernization à l’Européen.

Mickiewicz, astonished and despondent, looks at the gigantic Petersburg homes, lined along the streets, and the only comparison he finds is that of soldiers in formation: ‘All facades even, none than its neighbour higher / Like ranks of recruits, soiled, but in parade attire’. As if everything Russia creates is bound to mimic and reproduce the regime’s militaristic character.

The vision of the inhuman city and its despotic founder returns in perhaps the most famous of these poems, ‘The Statue of Peter the Great’. It depicts a scene with two bards – a Pole and a Russian – meeting under the statue of the Tsar. For Mickiewicz, the statue, representing Peter astride a rearing horse, becomes an apt symbol of unbridled, uncontrolled Russian imperialism. But the Russian bard is freedom-loving and represents hope as well as potential for transformation – as if nothing was fixed yet in the regime’s evolution.

Russia as a grand review ground

As if intuitively, Mickiewicz then turns to St. Petersburg’s Field of Mars, a giant square where soldiers trained and paraded – as if that was the place that best exemplified the nature of 19th-century Russia. In the longest poem, ‘A Review of the Troops’, Mickiewicz depicts such a parade, led by the Tsar in freezing temperatures:

Some call the grounds the Locust Incubator –
For here the Tsar coddles the bitter eggs
From which will hatch the military plagues
That turn the lands they light on to lunar craters

Mickiewicz describes the soldiers’ elaborate, almost mechanical movements, as if they were more of a device than a group of human beings. As if looking from above, he finds them similar in their multitude to insects (locusts!). At another time, and quite ironically, he skips over the people altogether and starts depicting horses. (After all, in the cavalry, aren’t they more important than people?! Plus, it’s easier to make out their physiognomies, according to Mickiewicz.) His description reveals the whole process of training as not only inhumane but also utterly dehumanising, with people becoming roles in the Tsar’s spectacle. This spectacle being the Empire.

In the poem's climactic final scene, Mickiewicz depicts the aftermath of the parade review: the injured and dead bodies left out in the square, frozen to death or crushed by fellow soldiers, horses and wagons. What is particularly striking for Mickiewicz is their silence in the face of death, the blatant lack of any expression of complaint or even faint protest. Only one soldier brings himself to utter obscene words cursing the Tsar, the master and architect of his misery. In him, with his foreign accent, Mickiewicz recognises a fellow Pole turned Russian soldier.

The complete lack of respect for human life, along with the most docile obedience on the part of the Empire's subordinates, is at the core of Mickiewicz’s vision of Russia. The poem ends with another dead body: a servant left out in the cold and forgotten by his owner. And with a thought, also typical of Mickiewicz’s stance towards Russia: ‘Poor nation – thus I mused beside his grave / Who know but such heroism: of a slave!’

‘This cup of venom’

In its subtle construction, Mickiewicz’s series concludes with ‘Oleszkiewicz’, which explores the historiosophic interpretation of the great Petersburg flood of 1824, an event the poet had witnessed, seen as punishment for the rulers’ sins. Then, in a sort of coda, Mickiewicz turns to individuals in ‘To Muscovite Friends’, the political activists and poets with whom he was in close contact in his early Russian days and who then took part in the Decembrists’ revolt – and by this time, had been either executed, imprisoned or deported. One stanza in that final gripping poem can be particularly useful in elucidating Mickiewicz’s idea behind his poetic sequence and its ultimate use:

If perchance these songs of mine shall pierce the Northern Skies
Flying to you, from lands of freedom, on mournful wing,
And should you hear their call far above the fields of ice,
May they be harbingers of freedom, like cranes, of spring.
[...]
Now this cup of venom I pour out in bitter flood.
Burning is my speech and corrosive its every sound,
I distilled this poison from my homeland’s tears and blood.
May it burn – not you – but the chains with which you are bound.

[translated by Charles Kraszewski]

Clearly, the Digression series was intended as revolutionary poetry meant to pave the way for freedom in Russia, to kindle hearts and minds and lead to a resistance against the despotic regime. All of this deems the Digression series as being the most striking, poignant critiques we have of the Russian Empire in its making. The sequence precedes other insightful works, including Astolphe de Custine’s Letters from Russia – and presents the situation just before it ultimately, irreversibly crystalised into militaristic despotism.

While writing these poems, Mickiewicz was still uncertain as to that final direction and shape the regime would soon take. Russia, for Mickiewicz, was still an enigma: a ‘blank card’ still to be inscribed by either God’s hand or that of the Devil. Today, two centuries on, that direction is all-too clear. A key factor facilitating this historical evolution was the rise of imperial culture and literature. And a key actor in that process was none other than Aleksander Pushkin. Who also happened to be among the earliest, most assiduous Russian readers of these Mickiewicz poems…

Friendship Gone Sour

The two poets, who were almost the same age (Mickiewicz was two months older), met several years earlier, in 1826 in Moscow, and soon became colleagues if not friends, both admiring each other’s work greatly as well as engaging in mutual translation projects.

But by 1832, when these Mickiewicz poems appeared, things were drastically different. Mickiewicz was able to exit Russia for good, having published the mesmerising Tatar-infused Crimean Sonnets (1826) and the subversive political epic poem Konrad Wallenrod (1828). Pushkin, formerly a liberal with democratic sympathies as well as author of anti-tsarist poems (including ‘Freedom’ and ‘To Chaadayev’), had composed such works as ‘Poltava’ (1828), which glorified Peter the Great’s defeat of the Swedish-Ukrainian forces – a military victory that paved the way for the subjugation of Ukraine. He also knew the ruthless reality of Russian colonial expansion first hand, having joined the expedition to the Caucasus and Turkey in 1829 under General Paskevich. According to Ewa Thompson, Pushkin’s account of these events, published as Journey to Erzerum (1835), would become a founding text of imperial colonialism in the Caucasus.

Just at this point, several of his poems had appeared in the wake of the November Uprising of 1830 across Polish lands, brutally quashed by the same General Paskevich. One of these programmatically anti-Polish pieces,‘To the Slanderers of Russia’, addressed French sympathisers with the Polish cause (and others in the West in general). Striking an awfully familiar chord in our day, Pushkin threatens Western Europe with Russian military power, advising them against taking sides in what he called ‘an ancient household strife, oft judged but still unending’. Thus, he rhetorically relegates the Polish national cause to an inner sphere of Russian or Slavic affairs. That sphere would only expand over time; as indicated by a famous poem by Fyodor Tyutchev, ‘Russian Geography’ (1848). In fact, no boundaries would be recognized, as it stretched from the Nile to Neva River, from the Elbe bordering German lands to China. Tyutchev, Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov were Russia’s greats of the 19th century, but this was also imperial literature at its most voracious and insatiable.

The Bronze Horseman Strikes

We know that Pushkin read Mickiewicz’s Digression attentively, perhaps even obsessively. He painstakingly copied all or much of three of the poems, in the original Polish: the flood poem‘Oleszkiewicz’ and ‘To Muscovite Friends’ in full, and the initial 31 lines from ‘The Statue of Peter the Great’. As the Polish scholar Marian Jakóbiec asserts, Pushkin most likely did this to better understand their meaning, as ‘he found them interesting mostly for personal and creative reasons, with no intention of translating them’.

That he wasn’t interested in translating these works is also evident from Pushkin’s ultimate reaction to these verses, which constituted a far-reaching rejection of Mickiewicz’s vision of Russia, St. Petersburg and Peter the Great. This rejection was made manifest in The Bronze Horseman (1833), one of the most famous, influential and perplexing poems in Russian literary history.

The Bronze Horseman tells an odd story about a Russian everyman named Eugene who loses his beloved wife in the Neva flood. Eugene then dies as he confronts the Bronze Horseman. In the final sequence of the poem, in what is likely Eugene’s paranoia, he starts to flee from the figure of the Tsar – who then appears to chase him. The poem, unequivocal as it may seem, is often read as Pushkin’s ultimate apology for the Tsar and his state, its supremacy over the individual and his personal dreams. Yet, its overall meaning is far from obvious.

This usual reading was certainly propped in place by the poet’s Prologue, in which he expresses his love for the city and the Russian state. The Prologue contains several open references to Mickiewicz’s text and Pushkin directly acknowledges that influence in his footnotes. In the Prologue and in the poem, he interprets (differently) the meaning of the statue of Peter the Great as the epitome of Russia, explores the historiosophic ramifications of the Great Flood of 1824, and presents his own vision of St. Petersburg. (For one thing, unlike Mickiewicz, he just loves military parades.)

As scholars have observed, Pushkin’s piece can be read en large as a polemic with Mickiewicz. At its heart is Peter the Great’s historical role, as symbolised by the statue in the imperial capital, and the character of the Russian state and its supreme relation over the individual. What Mickiewicz considered inhumane and tyrannical, Pushkin saw as positive overall: a rule, which despite some drawbacks, established Russia as a European superpower, providing unity and authority.

The Bronze Horseman came to be seen as a definitive moment for Russian literature, an ultimate apologia for the regime, justifying its track record of land grabs and exploitation, as well as all potential future claims and the inevitability of more victims in the process. Along with other Pushkin pieces, including Journey to Erzerum, the poem set the tone for imperial literature to come. As Ewa Thompson notes:

The poem is so artistically successful that its colonial tone and gilding of history have largely escaped attention: critics might have considered it tactless to seize upon the poem’s factual inaccuracies, in view of its resonant artistry. It is indeed one of the finest poems in Russian literature.

Pushkin died in 1837, championing to the end his unequivocal and perhaps a bit schizophrenic role as both an imperial poet and a self-proclaimed prisoner of Tsar Nicholas I, and continuing to produce lyrical masterpieces. His vision of Russian history and the legitimising role he came to play would live on long after his death. But Mickiewicz, one-time friend as well as inspired poetic (and political) rival, had remained a haunting presence in his life. In 1834, shortly after publishing The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin attempted to write a poem about Mickiewicz. Perhaps because of the unresolvable inner conflict, he never finished it.

Mickiewicz in Europe, or the anti-colonial text continues

As the Russian Empire continued to press forth in all directions, Mickiewicz – forced into a life as an émigré largely in the West after the November Uprising collapsed – engaged in yet another project enabling him to exert political influence. This time, it was as an overtly political author.

His first-hand experience of Russia appeared in his opinion pieces and journalism from the 1830s, published in the periodical Pielgrzym polski. His powerfully scathing anti-imperial critique, coupled with Polish messianism, reached its apex in 1832 with the publication of The Books of Polish Nation and Polish Pilgrimage.

However, it was only in the series of the so-called Parisian Lectures delivered at Collège de France in Paris in 1840–1842 that his reflections about Russia gained a new dimension and depth. Speaking from an academic lectern, in what was then the cultural and scientific centre of the Western world, the poet offered a new understanding of the contemporary political situation in Europe, in which the problem of Russia, especially vis-a-vis other Slavic nations, is central to the future of the continent. Warning against the possibility of Slavs uniting under Russian sceptre, Mickiewicz was denouncing this scenario as part of Russia’s own mission to convert Europe, one that would effectively pull Europe into Russia’s orbit.

Mickiewicz died in 1855 in Constantinople, where he had traveled to help organise Poles in joint European military efforts against Russia in the Crimean War. It was perhaps an apt summation of a life largely defined by seeking ways of resisting – in poetry, articles, anti-colonial philosophical discourse, political activity, and ultimately in military endeavours – that overbearing imperialism which at the time seemed practically unstoppable.

Ukraine’s Voice: Taras Shevchenko

Mickiewicz’s Paris Lectures – focused largely on Slavic literary history – also contain comments on Belarusians and Ukrainians, the two nations stretching between Poland and Russia. In hindsight, the most striking absence in the published lectures may be that of Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861) and his work. Though perhaps this is not inexplicable, as Shevchenko’s debut collection, Kobzar, was published in 1840, the year Mickiewicz’s lectures started to take shape.

While Mickiewicz and Shevchenko, 16 years his junior, may have never met, they surely shared circles and orbits. Shevchenko studied drawing in Vilnius in 1829, where he likely heard about the Philomaths, Mickiewicz and his friends who had been arrested, convicted and deported several years earlier. The following year, when the future Ukrainian national poet arrived in St. Petersburg, Mickiewicz was already gone, having left Russia, never to return. Shevchenko had read his poems, and knew some by heart. His Petersburg circle came to include Polish acquaintances, fellow radicals and democrats.

A pivotal moment in Shevchenko’s life and literary career came in Kyiv in 1846 when the writer joined a secret political society, the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. Created by Mykola Kostomarov, the society’s goal was the rebirth of Ukrainian culture and statehood. Kostomarov was the author of The Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People, largely inspired by Mickiewicz’s The Books of the Polish People and of the Polish Pilgrimage. In 1847, Shevchenko, whose poems were circulated in the society, was arrested by the Russian secret police, along with other members of the group, and was eventually sentenced to what eventually turned out to be a decade of prison and deportation. In the course of the investigation, the secret police came across a copy of Shevchenko’s The Dream, an anti-Tsarist visionary poem that then became trial evidence. Other compromising materials found in papers of his fellow Brotherhood members included… Mickiewicz’s Digression poems.

Taras Shevchenko - Drawings from Ukraine [gallery]

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‘The Dream’, or anti-imperial Shevchenko

Subtitled ‘A Comedy’, The Dream was written in 1844 and comes from the period known as the Three Years. The work, as well as other pieces from that period, was not intended for publication (it would not be published in the Russian Empire until 1907). In the poem, Shevchenko depicts a dreamlike narrative wherein the poet attempts to leave this world, as if he were a bird, and fly over the Russian Empire, taking wing from Ukraine and then crossing Siberia (with its prisoners toiling in mines) and eventually soaring over the capital, St. Petersburg. What he sees comprises the most grim, satirical perspective on Russia.

This potent vision, as scholars have noted, shares similarities with ‘Great Improvisation’ in Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve, Part III, and with the Digression poems, specifically. This goes especially for Shevchenko’s bird’s-eye view of the imperial capital: with its opulent buildings constructed on marshes (‘A swampy, boggy lowland spreads / And in that slough a city stands’) and with soldiers engaged in drills, looking from above like so many strutting cranes. Similarly, the depiction of the statue of Peter the Great (the Tsar is described as the first ‘who crucified unfortunate Ukraine”, with his successor Catherine, ‘[t]he Second – she who finished off / Whatever yet remained’), can also be seen as a reference to the Digression poems. As Ukrainian scholar Hryhoriy Verves has observed, Shevchenko – under the statue of Peter the Great – was joining the discussion with Mickiewicz and Pushkin, adding his perspective on the Empire. For example, Shevchenko, with his acute social awareness, observes the terrible poverty in this ‘great city’. At another point, he recognises the roles of Ukrainians making their careers in the imperial administration, just more cogs in the Russian state’s inexorable machine.

Shevchenko’s vision is deeply original, marked by his own inimitable genius. The Dream,when compared with Mickiewicz’s series, makes much broader use of caricature and satire, perhaps in keeping with Ukrainian folk and literary traditions. Shevchenko portrays a scene where the Tsar smacks his subordinates, which leads to a domino effect, with everyone beating his junior servant. The poem ends with a truly iconoclastic vision of the Tsar, pictured as a great drunken bear ambling around the palace roaring, and his terrified dignitaries as well as footmen falling flat on the floor, hiding or trying to disappear. Even the great Tsar can seem quite helpless, at one point reminding the poet of a pussycat. Then he’s roaring once again, terribly – and the poet awakens from his vision.

Shevchenko's buried treasure

For the police, Shevchenko’s piece was ‘full of the most audacious and coarse descriptions of the members of the Royal family’, which added to the harsh sentence he received of deportation to some of the Empire’s most remote and isolated areas (Orenburg on the Ural River, the Orsk fortress along the Aral Sea). For Shevchenko, the ordeal included a ban on any writing and drawing, at the Tsar’s instruction, with other searches taking place daily until 1857.

Despite these measures, he would leave an awe-inspiring trove of anti-imperialist poetry. To mention just one, his poem ‘The Caucasus’ empathised with nations of Caucasian mountaineers while ingeniously ridiculing the official discourse of mission civilisatrice in the region. It is telling that it was a copy of ‘The Caucasus’ that Shevchenko chose to send to Mickiewicz in Paris via a Ukrainian acquaintance.

According to some scholars, also ‘The Great Dungeon’ (‘Veliki Lokh’), another poem from the Three Years period, bears traces of Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve. Part III. Dubbed the ‘Mysterium’ by Shevchenko, this mystical allegory about Ukraine’s history and future – its legacy symbolically represented as a treasure lying hidden in the deepest underground dungeons, secure from Russian excavation works – is yet another strong anti-colonial poem from his output.

Embracing consistently anti-imperial positions led Shevchenko to re-assess his stance on Polish-Ukrainian historical relations. Remarkably, his early critical look on Poland’s role in subjugating Ukraine (as seen, for example, in the poem 'Hajdamaky') would eventually give way to a sense of solidarity and even brotherhood between the two nations. This is particularly conspicuous in his poem ‘To Poles’ (1847) where a vision of the original idyllic co-existence is shattered by the priests and magnates. The poem ends with a summoning to collaboration and brotherhood and a call ‘to rebuild our little quiet paradise’. The poem, often published in Polish translations as ‘To Polish Friends’, can be seen as yet another proof of a common anti-imperial poetic tradition (comp. Mickiewicz's ‘To Muscovite Friends’).

In writing these and other patriotic, anti-tsarist poems, Shevchenko would pay the ultimate price. He died in 1861, in St. Petersburg, having been arrested in Ukraine again for ‘fomenting unrest in the nation’. He was only 47, with every reason to feel hopeless about Ukraine’s future, subjugated by the Empire. Yet the poetic and ideological legacy he left – a buried treasure itself that would await its unearthing and revival – has endured, influencing subsequent generations, including authors like Ivan Franko or Lesya Ukrainka.

Taras Shevchenko – Drawings from Deportation Period [gallery]

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Pushkinization, or The Empire Turns the Screw

In the decades following the deaths of Mickiewicz and Shevchenko, Russia would double down on repressive measures in regions it had conquered in the late 18th century (much of Poland and Ukraine, Belarus as well as the Baltic states) and through the 19th century (the Caucasus and Central Asia). Further legal codes were imposed, limiting use of local languages, erasing those cultures and, as was often the case, even wiping out the names of those lands and peoples.

Just two years after Shevchenko’s death, the tsarist government banned use of Ukrainian in primary literacy training as well as in periodical publications, such as newspapers, under the assumption that the language(termed in imperial discourse malorusskiy, or Little Russian) ‘never existed, doesn't exist, and cannot exist’. In 1876, the use of the name Ukraine was forbidden across the Empire, as part of the Ems decree by Alexander II. Any book publications in the Ukrainian language were at that point forbidden too. Similar if unofficial legislation was imposed in Belarus with regard to the use of the Belarusian language, which had been forbidden in print (in Latin and Cyrylic scripts) from the early 19th century.

In Poland, over the second half of the 19th century’s course, the Kingdom of Poland became the Vistula Country (Krai Privislyanskiy) in official imperial documents. Mickiewicz’s work – Forefathers’ Eve, specifically – was banned at different times, as was even mentioning the poet’s name. The censorship imposed in the Russian partition of Poland was severe by any standard, certainly in comparison to the Prussian and Austrian partitions of the country through the 19th century.

The intense censorship across the conquered territories in Eastern Europe was accompanied by the top-down Russification, which included elementary schools and higher education, state administration and other institutions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, from the late 19th century, the official face of this Russification was… Alexander Pushkin. His works were integral to the official school curricula across the Empire. Starting in this same period, streets were renamed and monuments to the poet were erected, from Odesa (Ukraine) and Chisinau (Moldova) to Tbilisi (Georgia) and Ashgabat (Turkmenistan).

The process of ‘Pushkinization’ would intensify in the Soviet era, across the very lands that had constituted the Empire. In a way, it would fulfil Pushkin’s prophecy: ‘Rumour of me shall then my whole vast country fill / In every tongue she owns my name she'll speak. / Proud Slav's posterity, Finn, and-unlettered still / The Tungus, and the steppe-loving Kalmyk’ (‘A Monument I’ve Raised’).

All throughout this period, a myth of friendship between 'the two greatest Slavic poets', Mickiewicz and Pushkin, was carefully constructed and promoted. In iconography, the image of the two poets standing under the Bronze Horseman (a scene lifted from one of Mickiewicz's Digression poem and likely resulting from a misunderstanding of the poem's context) was particularly instrumental in disseminating the 'Friendship' myth in popular imagination. In the spirit of Russian Pan-Slavic ideology, this was a capstone endorsing the alleged bonds between the two nations. It also effectively obscured insurmountable political differences between the two poets – and the two nations.

Mickiewicz & Shevchenko under Communism

And yet, despite severe censorship and thorough Russification, both Mickiewicz’s and Shevchenko’s poetry and the political messages found ways to reach readerships in their homelands and beyond. Their works were published in Galicia – the partitioned region under the Austro-Hungarian Empire – where both Ukrainian and Polish culture flourished far more freely. In Lwów (now Lviv), Shevchenko’s work was promoted intensely by the writer and national activist Ivan Franko, among others. It was in Galicia’s other major city, Kraków – just as the 20th century began – that Mickiewicz’s drama Forefathers’ Eve was first staged, a seemingly impossible task taken up by the artist and director Stanisław Wyspiański, which began a storied theatrical life for the work.

In the years following the First World War, and with the establishment of Ukraine as a Soviet republic, the Bolsheviks turned to Shevchenko and to national sentiments to garner support among the population. This policy, known as korenizatsiia, proved rather short-lived and soon enough turned into its opposite. By the late 1920s, the Soviets moved to destroy Ukrainian national culture, ruthlessly targeting intellectuals, scholars and activists. Attempts to move the culture closer to the West and ‘away from Moscow’, as in Mykola Khvylovy’s ambitious modernisation project, met with brutal repercussions. Again, writers and poets were in the first rank, suffering suppressions and executions, as in the case of what would be termed the Executed Renaissance. Folk culture – which had been so dear in Shevchenko’s sense of tradition – was targeted in particularly crushing ways, as is evident in the case of targeted murders of bandurists and kobzars, the Ukrainian folk minstrels and keepers of musical and oral traditions.The Holodomor, the Soviet Russian–engineered famine in the early 1930s, which killed millions of Ukrainians, was the most deadly attempt to subjugate Ukrainians.

Also after the Second World War, poets in Soviet Ukraine continued to be enemies of the regime. Vasyl Stus, the most famous and unflinching of these poets, spent at least 13 years in Soviet prisons and penal colonies. Stus died while serving yet another prison term in 1985, a few years before the collapse of the USSR – in the midst of perestroika, at least theoretically. His fate, however, was emblematic of not only his generation of Ukrainian poets.

Meanwhile, in Communist Poland (1944–1989), Mickiewicz and his work was handled with caution. That explosive potential proved particularly volatile for the Communist authorities in 1968 when the closing of a National Theatre production of Forefathers’ Eve led to a nationwide crisis.

Overall, a skewed Pan-Slavic myth of a Mickiewicz-Pushkin friendship was being officially endorsed once again, which succeeded in eclipsing the reality of their complicated relations, as well as fundamental political conflicts between the two poets, their work and posthumous public presences. The friendship myth has likely also contributed to the blurring of a much closer spiritual and political affinity of Mickiewicz and Shevchenko – the two truly greatest Slavic poets of freedom – eclipsing also the latter’s close ties with Polish liberal and democratic activists who shared his political ideals, like Zygmunt Sierakowski, the future leader of the 1863 January Uprising.

The Empire Strikes Back…

Joseph Brodsky teaching at the University of Michigan, circa 1972, photo from The Michiganensian, 1973, page 55, photo: CC / Wikimedia

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought on a worldwide range of ramifications, not least in the field of cultural power games. The USSR may have begun cracking up in 1989, but the Empire – and, specifically, the imperial mindset – refused to go away. One of the most jarring poetic responses to this collapse and the liberation of former republics in 1991, came from the Nobel Prize laureate and dissident Joseph Brodsky. In a now notorious poem, ‘On Ukrainian Independence’(1991), Brodsky scoffed at the Ukrainian desire to break from Russia, ridiculing its culture in vile, vulgar language.

In the telling conclusion of Brodsky’s poetic pamphlet, he invoked Pushkin and Shevchenko: ‘You’ll whisper and wheeze, your deathbed mattress a-pushing / Not Shevchenko’s bullshit but poetry lines from Pushkin’. Brodsky, by contrasting the two poets, may have inadvertently re-established the underlying and penetrating clash of ideas which ranges far beyond the aesthetic quality of their respective poetic outputs.

This was, in fact, not the first time Brodsky used his broad platform to promote the cause of Great Russian imperialism. Some 25 years earlier, in a similar way, he had ridiculed the writer Milan Kundera’s concept of Central European distinctness. At that time, Brodsky was using another giant of Russian and world literature, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to push the idea of Russian cultural hegemony in the face of Kundera’s separatist, individualist voice.

Brodsky’s anti-Ukrainian poem remained something of a public secret (admittedly, it did draw early attention from such writers as Oxana Zabuzhko). It resurfaced to wider attention only in 2014, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. And was shared on social media by many Russian outlets, among shouts of #KrymNash (Crimea [Is] Ours) and rallying cries to ‘recapture’ the Donbas at the eastern edge of Ukraine, taken by separatist factions with Russian military support. At that time, one of the few poetic voices of resistance in Russia came from Igor Belov, who in the first days of Crimea’s annexation, published a poem on social media that remixed Brodsky’s poem from 23 years earlier.

Resistance Poetry

Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and the war with Ukraine that followed in the latter’s Donbas region in 2014 brought poetic responses in Polish poetry, as well, with its alert awareness of Russian imperialism. Among the most relevant and affecting of these was a 2014 series by Zbigniew Machej. His ironic ‘Sonety hybrydowe i piekielne' (Sonnets hybrid and infernal) make for bitter commentary on Russia’s post-truth imperial politics, its cynical propaganda, hybrid warfare, Russia Today TV programming and other ruthless and updated tactics. Masterminding fake news goes fist-in-glove along with use of military strategy (combined with the use of imperial culture and Orthodox religion). What emerges in Machej’s dark vision is Russia as an unrepentant killing machine where high culture goes hand in hand with propaganda and militarism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Adam Mickiewicz is found inside these poems, in bitter references to occupied Crimea and the poet’s Crimean Sonnets from the 19th century.

These and other voices from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe – Ukraine, in particular – then intensified in late February 2022 with the recent, full-scale Russian invasion. Yet again, poets and writers were in the centre of the patriotic-resistance efforts, including taking up arms, as with Oleg Sentsov and Artem Chekh, along with leading roles in defending their communities, as is with Serhiy Zhadan in Kharkiv. Others including Oleksandr Irvanets, Iryna Tsilyk, Liubov Iakymchuk, Kateryna Kalytko, Marianna Kiyanovska, Iya Kiva, Kateryna Mikhalitsyna, Vasyl Slapchuk and many others have been striving to express the war’s horror, to find words of solace and to denounce Russian imperialism. As war once again proves its unavoidable reality, it renders the voice of poets to be particularly needed, even if sometimes this comes along with the most bitter realisation of poetry’s uselessness, especially in the face of atrocities, like those in Bucha and elsewhere – as was brought to attention by award-winning poet Halyna Kruk in her speech at the Berlin Poetry Festival in June 2022.

"I don’t know of any metaphors that can make my words more appealing or less shocking. Metaphors don’t work against men with machine-guns. No poetry can protect you when a tank hits your car and crushes you and your family."

One thing is certain: the present Russian invasion of Ukraine has above all accelerated the process of unraveling Ukraine from Russian colonial dependency. Imperialism and colonialism, as inscribed in the traditional and contemporary Russian mindsets but also in its culture with ‘great Russian literature’ from Pushkin to Dostoyevsky and beyond, in particular, has never been more conspicuous and exposed. Corresponding with that, as the last monuments of Russian friendship come tumbling down in Ukraine, so do the monuments of those same writers, a process known as Pushkinopad (from the Leninopad that took place after 2014).

Meanwhile, the figure of Mickiewicz stands firm, as do his monuments across Ukraine, from Lviv to Ivano-Frankivsk and from Zbarazh to Kyiv. His position as a salient classic of anti-imperial and anti-colonial Eastern European writing becomes more prominent and relevant than ever. The powerful political and poetic discourse of resistance he once helped to forge, uniting him with Taras Shevchenko’s poetic output and life, seems today even more pertinent and relatable throughout countries once bound to the Empire.

Let’s hope their legacy of freedom, respect (for human life) and truth will eventually triumph, in Russia as well. In Mickiewicz’s words: ‘[m]ay it burn – not you – but the chains by which you are bound’.

Author: Mikołaj Gliński, September 2022; with special thanks to Alan Lockwood.

^{Sources: Adam Mickiewicz, Forefathers’ Eve, translated by Charles Kraszewski, Glagoslav Publications, 2016; Marian Toporowski, ‘Wstęp’ in: Aleksander Pushkin, Dzieła, PIW, 1967; Marian Jakóbiec, ‘Wstęp’, in: Taras Szewczenko, Wybór poezji, Biblioteka Narodowa, 1974; Hryhoriy Verves, ‘Szewczenko i romantyzm polski’, in: Tam gdzie Ikwy srebrne fale płyną, PWN, 1972; Ewa M. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism, Westport, CT and London: Greenwood 2000.}

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adam mickiewicz

polish romantic literature

polish and ukrainian authors

ukrainian literature

russian poet