The Ghost of Mickiewicz

mickiewicz_odbudowa_warszawy.jpg, default, The head of the monument to Adam Mickiewicz, 1948, photo: Karol Pecherski / APW / Forum

#language & literature

The literature of the 18th and 19th centuries was steeped in folk customs related to vampiric beings. Dramatic descriptions of battles with ghouls are found in many classic works of Polish literature. From Adam Mickiewicz to Elżbieta Drużbacka, we’ll explore how Polish writers explored the ghostly unknown.

An unusual case from the village of Tuchla

On 28 July 1873, Gazeta Lwowska, one of the oldest Polish newspapers, reported in its ‘Chronicle’ section the disturbing events happening in the villages of Tuchla and Sławsko. The raging cholera epidemic in the area was prompting peasants to dig up graves and mutilate the corpses, for it was feared the dead were rising from their graves and causing the deadly disease.

Peasants from Tuchla and Sławsko believed in the old wives’ tale, the origins of which are unknown, that the cause of cholera stems from people who walk after death – vampires. Driven by this monstrous superstition, the peasants of Tuchla, advised and guided by Olex Ilkov of Lybokhora, at night dug up the body of the deceased mayor Mikołaj Macewki – who was considered a vampire – and drove three stakes into his corpse, namely into the head, the side and the back, then Olex Ilkov shot the corpse, and finally it was dismembered, blood and soil were taken from the grave and distributed as protection against cholera

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photo: National Library / Polona.pl

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Just over two weeks later, the same newspaper published a more extensive description of the incidents happening in the Stryjski District. Those responsible for the desecration of the graves – the participants of the vampire hunts – either died from cholera or were captured by the gendarmerie. This time, the comprehensive note did not spare its readers shocking details and remarks on the mental condition of the Galician villagers.

These scenes are real, as if taken out of the fantastic novels of Hoffmann or the gruesome paintings of Callot and Bruegel. And yet all this took place among Poles, in Galicia, among the Polish people, who unfortunately, at the bottom of their souls, somewhere in the depths of their dark imagination, harbour superstitious beliefs in the most monstrous phenomenon and sorcery…

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The account devotes more attention to the treatment of the corpse of the aforementioned Mikołaj Macewki, regarded as a plague-spreading vampire. The blood drained from him was used by the peasants as an antidote to cholera.

The perpetrators went on this terrible expedition with axes and a supply of wooden stakes, the most effective means against vampires. Olex cut up the corpse in the coffin and pierced its limbs with wooden stakes. Then he squeezed thick and clotted blood from the chopped corpse into a vessel. This blood was to be an infallible cure for cholera... One of his comrades, Jakim Bereżyniec, took the blood with him to distribute it among the people. Michał Macewka gave it to his wife, who was ill with cholera, and Jakim, to another ill peasant woman.

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The newspaper describes the cases from Tuchla and Sławsko as unusual and disgusting events, archaic superstitions of Galician villagers presented as unenlightened and primitive beings. Vampire hunting, digging up graves, and the chopping up dead bodies was, for the educated elite at the beginning of the last quarter of the 19th century, a sign of uncivilisation.

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A drawing by Cyprian Kamil Norwid, 1870, photo: Biblioteka Narodowa / Polona.pl

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The problem is that most readers of Gazeta Lwowska had already encountered a disturbingly similar description of drinking blood and cleaving the body. It was created by Adam Mickiewicz and placed in the first scene of Forefathers’Eve, part III. It is the Dresden Forefathers’ Eve, seemingly taken out of its communal context, that conveys the essence of folk knowledge about corpses rising from graves. In the song preceding the ‘Little Improvisation’, Konrad sings:

My song says: ‘Now an evening stroll I’ll take.
First, I must bite my brother, fellow Poles’ –
In someone’s soul my claws I now must slake,
A ghost like me must drink the blood of souls.
And then I’ll drink the foeman’s blood in pails!
I’ll cut his body open with an axe,
I’ll fix his hands down and his legs with nails,
Lest he should rise and claim a vampire's tax.
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In the role of a mystical-political metaphor, Mickiewicz used the obligatory elements of vampiric, or rather ‘ghoulish’ characterisation: the drinking of blood (of loved ones), infecting and neutralising, which required chopping up the body of the vampire and consuming its blood. Forty years later, the unfortunate body of Tuchla’s mayor, Macewki, was treated in precisely this way by his neighbours.

Return from beyond the grave by a route

While Mickiewicz explained the ritual of Forefathers’ Eve in the introduction to the second part of his famous drama, he did not devote such an overview to the vampire. The phenomenon, therefore, must have been known to the readers. Where did the general knowledge about vampires and their behaviour come from? The poet claims to have seen the ghostly forefathers with his own eyes. The Romantic vampire, meanwhile, could have been a somewhat more symbolic phenomenon and could have come by a circuitous route – through German and English literature, with Bürger and Byron at the forefront. In his commentary on the late ballad Ucieczka (The Escape), Mickiewicz writes directly about the similarity of the motif of a lover returning from the afterlife with Bürger's Lenore:

This novel is familiar to all people from Christian countries. Poets have adapted it in various ways. Bürger composed his famous Lenora from it. […] I have composed this ballad according to a song that I once heard in Lithuania sung in Polish. I was faithful to the content and arrangement, but there were barely a few folk poems left in my memory, and these I used as stylistic examples.
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Lord Byron's Poezye translated, Giaur by Adam Mickiewicz; Corsair by Edward Odyniec, Paris 1835, photo: Polona

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No wonder that this ‘Lithuanian song’ and the apocryphal quatrain ‘The moon shines / The dead man flies / The dress – abracadabra, / Miss! Aren't you afraid?’ (Trans. AD) evoked by Antoni Edward Odyniec in his translation of Lenora (Re-baptised as Adela) have become a fetish for folklorists trying to find a folk prototype for Ucieczka. A more intricate journey of information can be seen in Mickiewicz's translation of The Giaour. There, the vampire – as in Konrad's song – goes out to drink the blood of his loved ones.

But first, on earth as Vampire sent,
Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife...
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Mickiewicz acknowledges the appearance of a vampire in the Byron’s ‘Turkish’ poem with a succinct footnote: ‘Belief in vampires is widespread in the East. The Turks call them Vardoulacha; the Greeks are equally afraid of them, and tell many terrible stories about them (Trans. AD).

In the original, things are different – Byron in The Giaour (1813) adds two extensive footnotes in which he cites not only travellers' accounts but also his own experiences.

The freshness of the face, and the wetness of the lip with blood, are the never-failing signs of a vampire. The stories told in Hungary and Greece of these foul feeders are singular, and some of them most incredibly attested.

There is a certain paradox in the romantic explanations of the vampire phenomenon. Mickiewicz or Ostrowski use Bürger, Byron, and Goethe to describe phenomena well known in the territory of the former Republic of Poland. Byron himself juxtaposes his own experiences with the century-old travel accounts of the French botanist Tournefort, who in his travels saw the inhabitants of the island of Mykonos struggle with ‘brucolacas’. The Cycladic ghoul, however, was neither indigenously Greek nor Turkish – βρυκόλακας or vrykolakas penetrated the Mediterranean imagination from the Balkan Slavs, and its name comes from the Slavic ‘wilkołak’ (werewolf).

Thus, Polish Romantics justified the presence of vampires drawn from folk beliefs by following world poets. Similarly, Mickiewicz referred to Byron to explain to his readers what a Russian kibitka is, which is well known in Lithuania. The necessity of such procedures is demonstrated in Forefathers’ Eve, part III, when he says in a Warsaw salon: ‘I swear, I know less about Lithuania than about China Le Constitutionnel once wrote something about the Lithuanians’ (Trans. AD).

Ghostbusters of the Enlightenment

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'Mascaron smiling', drawing by Cyprian Kamil Norwid, photo: National Library / Polona.pl

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Tournefort's Relation d'un voyage du Levant, very important for the appearance of the vampiric theme in Byron’s work, approaches the story of Mykonos’ ‘brucolaco’ very critically and even with irony. This approach was characteristic to most 18th-century works that deal with the theme of the dead rising out of the grave. The Age of Enlightenment was a century of mass hysteria, of countless reports of living corpses sucking blood, and of the toughest heads and sharpest scholars fighting this ‘obscurant superstition’. The Slavic region was the epicentre of the vampiric fever, and the mood prevailing in the Republic was superbly, and not without irony, reflected by Count Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński in his 1852 Wieczory Badeńskie (Evenings in Baden):

Ghouls were all you could hear about in the entire area of Terebovlya. […] Somewhere a very hungry one sucked the blood out of all living under one roof, leaving not a single child in its cradle to breed, [...] In a few dozen Ruthenian and several Latin [Catholic] parishes, priests ordered that bodies be dug up from their graves and summarily decapitated and that their hearts be pierced with stakes. The blood of ghouls was being peddled for more than caramelised vodka, and their powdered blood fetched even higher prices than fleur de sel.

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The title page of 'The Devil ...' by Jan Bohomolec, Warsaw 1775, photo: Polona

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Jan Bohomolec, later overshadowed by the fame of his brother Franciszek, created a unique work of the Polish Enlightenment period entitled Diabeł w Swojej Postaci, z Okazji Pytania: ‘Jeśli Są Upiory?’, Ukazany (The Devil As It Is). One might get the impression that this is yet another manifestation of the obscurantism that clerical authors of that time were often accused of. Nothing of the sort. Diabeł w Swojej Postaci… is an efflorescence of extraordinary erudition, with carefully chosen argumentation. Bohomolec fights against the belief in vampires, referring not only to church authorities, but also to the latest discoveries in physics, chemistry, and natural history. In addition, he does not spare his readers juicy descriptions, thanks to which his recalling of Tournefort's account becomes grotesque.

Diabeł w Swojej Postaci... became so popular that there were pirated editions and polemics from supporters of the existence of vampires – predicted, after all, by the author himself. Its first words are:

Thee asketh me sire whether vampires exist? The answer to this question is as difficult as it is dangerous. If I sayeth they doth: I sharpen the scholars’ pens. If I sayeth they doth not: the commoners shall reproach me.

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Bohomolec was not, however, the first to critique the belief in vampires; Ossoliński mentions a century-older poet in his introduction: ‘Didn't Wacław Potocki indulge himself in jokes, even such ones that would turn a face red?’ He perhaps had in mind the epigram from Strzyga, in which Potocki approaches the peasants’ fear of a living corpse with truly Sarmatian humour:

A peasant has died, and to and fro they runneth to me,
So that I would not order to have the strzygoń buried by the church,
until they cutteth his head off with a shovel.
I asketh, for what deserveth he such a cruel punishment?
Within a year, all his relatives,
brothers, children, sons-in-law will be dead. So as to his kinship,
he must be cut down there.
What, sir? The jewels, I sayeth, and with the head let him lie.

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Elżbieta Drużbacka took a different approach to the matter. Her Sprzeczka z Różnymi Zakonnikami o Upirach, którym Autorka tych Wierszów Wiary Nie Daje (Quarrel with Various Monks about Ghosts, of which the Author of these Poems Does Not Believe) is written from the perspective of a pious lady who puts forward a number of arguments of a theological, thaumaturgic, and hagiological nature, sticking to Catholic orthodoxy more firmly than clerical authors. She makes a passionate appeal to Bishop Andrzej Załuski:

Do this so that thee shall cast out the ghouls
Who choketh people and walketh in the night,
Driveth them out of Poland, alloweth them do their work
Spreading to the Jews, Calvinists, and Lutherans death with their breath.
Hardly a day goeth by when the passing monks
Speak of aught else,
Than how the dead art hath brought forth
from their graves by Satan's tricks […]

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Although this is supposed to be a criticism of folk superstition (fuelled, according to the poet, by monks), the description is suggestive enough that the author may be suspected of having a fascination with ghouls herself. They also reappear in her occasional poem Dekret na Upierów Morzących Hetmana (Decree Against the Vampires Tormenting the Commander), where the ‘vampires’ are the critics of Jan Klemens Branicki.

Perhaps it was the writings of those opposing the existence of vampires, full of macabre descriptions, accounts of peculiar journeys, and fuelled by an effort to explain the phenomenon rationally, that inspired the Romantics to reach for this folk theme. The ghostbusters, as it were, brought these ghosts to life themselves, introduced them into the consciousness of enlightened society, and eventually, into literature. Several dozen years after Bohomolec, the so-called dispute between the Classics and the Romantics was at times reduced to the issue of the living dead. In Franciszek Morawski's Second letter to the Romantics we read:

Thee frighten me in vain with thy monsters,
Magic, spirits, devils,strzygas and ghouls; [...]
It is enough that one of thee is chocked by a nightmare in the night,
Or drags a filthy ghoul out;
Then already another runs after him in the nocturnal hour,
Tears down old coffins, ploughs through cemeteries,
Awakens century sleeping corpses with his terrible rhymes, <
And, as if tormenting the living were not enough, he bores the dead too<

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The Vjesci

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photo: National Library / Polona.pl

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On 16 February 1841, during his fifteenth lecture on Slavic literature at the Collège de France, Mickiewicz touched upon the subject of Slavic ghouls. Referring to the work of Ivan Vahylevych, he treated the subject in an academic and folkloristic manner:

The vampire is born, as they maintain, with a dual heart and a dual soul. Until adolescence, he lives without knowing himself, without being aware of his own being; but when he reaches a turning point in his life, he begins to feel a destructive feeling developing in his heart, and this soul, which the scholar Dalibor calls a negative soul, a negative heart, begins to take over. [...] Thus plague, cattle diseases, and even famine are, according to the Slavs, the work of ghouls. These beliefs are particularly rooted in the Danube countries – Serbia, Carniola, and Herzegovina. Some years ago, when cholera was rampant in those parts, the people attributed the disease to the destructive influence of ghouls; many men and women died at the hands of the community, who suspected them of being vampires or of having relations with ones.

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While telling the story of Balkan vampires spreading cholera, Mickiewicz could not have foreseen similar incidents in Galician villages 30 years later. Meanwhile, the wraithlike prototype he introduced into literature still persisted among the people, and was soon to become a significant subject for the pioneers of Polish ethnology.

In his works constituting a monumental study of folk culture of the lands of the former Republic of Poland, Oskar Kolberg repeatedly returned to the subject of peasants' understanding of the ‘transcendental world’. While researching the Wielkopolska and Pomorze regions, he noticed that the vampire is called a ‘wieszczy’ or ‘vjesci’ there. In his notes from Chełmno, he wrote:

They believe in so-called vjesci, or vampires, that they come out of the grave and suffocate relatives, and after their burial, other people as well. […] To make him harmless, they dig him up and cut off his head, placing it between his legs. The blood that comes out when the head is cut off is given to the strangled sick person to drink.

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When Mickiewicz called himself a ‘wieszcz’ (which also means ‘bard’) amid a group of Towiański followers, he was rather unaware of the regional meaning of the word. And although there is no indication that he exhibited disturbing posthumous activity, one can keep in mind the concise definition from Jan Karłowicz's Dictionary of Polish Dialects: ‘Wieszcz – a man who is destined to become a ghost after death’.

Originally written in Polish by Łukasz Kozak, translated by Agnes Dudek, Nov 2021

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