Like few poets in history, Adam Mickiewicz had an influence on societies and individuals across the world, shaping attitudes and setting in motion great processes that are still underway.
INFLUENCE is an attempt to chart the unacknowledged, often obscured impact the Polish poet has had on global history and our contemporary world.
This influence, often profoundly political, decolonising and emancipatory, has yet to be described in its totality, as it is only fully emerging in our day…
Subversively: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
In many of his works, including those that were published under censorship, Adam Mickiewicz encrypted models of criticism and resistance against a mightier foe. In others he smuggled subversive strategies for carving out national and cultural independence. Yet even his works that seem far from political often had an unpredictable political effect, contributing to the emancipation of neighbouring countries that were once part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. How was Mickiewicz read by Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belarusians and Jews – and by the people of Crimea?
Shevchenko, Mickiewicz & the Birth of Anti-Imperial Poetic Discourse
Though they never met, their fates and works are linked by affinities that run deeper than literature. In their own languages, they both laid the foundations for a pioneering anti-imperial discourse, for which the Ukrainian poet paid the ultimate price.
Czytaj więcejThe Native Poet of Belarus: The Field of Mickiewicz & the Birth of Belarusian Literature
Adam Mickiewicz’s Ballads and Romances and Forefathers’ Eve mark the beginning of a new Romantic epoch in Polish literature. But what if those same works are at the dawn of modern Belarusian literature? What was Mickiewicz’s role and influence on the formation of the Belarusian national consciousness?
Czytaj więcej‘Lithuania, my homeland…’: Pan Tadeusz & the Origins of Modern Lithuanian Literature
What is the significance of the fact that, in the Invocation to Pan Tadeusz, Mickiewicz does not mention Poland? And what was the impact of the poet’s work on Lithuania’s literature and national identity, with its cult of wild nature and eco-poetics?
Czytaj więcejA Prophet in a Foreign Land: How the Jews Read Konrad Wallenrod
The subversive strategies of resistance and models of effective action which Mickiewicz forged in literature exerted an influence that went beyond Polish readers. One of the most interesting historical examples of the poet’s impact is the story of the reception of Konrad Wallenrod in Hebrew literature by Polish Jews.
Czytaj więcejThe Tartar Crimean Sonnets: Resistance & Poetry in an Occupied Territory
In Mickiewicz’s Crimean Sonnets, we find no trace of Russia. We do find a multicultural Tartar Crimea with all its dated glory and memory of the recent past. Is this why this work could, in time, become a point of departure for an anti-imperial Crimean cycle written in a variety of languages by poets of Ukraine?
Czytaj więcejGlobally: From Afar
Mickiewicz’s poetry exerted a surprising influence on authors across a range of nations and cultures, often working in similar colonial conditions, subject to an empire or metropole. Mickiewicz’s words travelled to the furthest corners of the globe – adapted to local socio-political conditions, they made an emancipatory mark thousands of kilometres from the poet’s homeland. What did readers from the antipodes, peripheries, and colonies see in Mickiewicz, from the Caucasus to Brazil, from the Near East to China?
‘To the Polish Mother’ in Brazil: The Experience of Slavery in South America
What could a Romantic nineteenth-century poet from Brazil have seen in Adam Mickiewicz’s ‘To the Polish Mother’? And what does his interpretation tell us about the experience of political and colonial oppression on both sides of the Atlantic?
Czytaj więcejA Promethean Mickiewicz in the Caucasus: Farys & Wallenrod in Georgia & Armenia
Although Adam Mickiewicz himself never made it to the Caucasus, his poetic words and message of freedom did. What role in the history of the nations of the Caucasus did Mickiewicz’s protagonists play, and by what routes did they reach readers in this land where Europe meets Asia?
Czytaj więcejFarys, A Polish Rider amid the Sands of the Desert – Among the Arabs & Jews
How Mickiewicz’s Orientalising poem written in frosty Saint Petersburg galloped off to the Bedouin desert – and from there, straight into Arab and Hebrew literature.
Czytaj więcejThe Power of Mara Poetry: Mickiewicz’s Voice of Revenge in China
What does Mickiewicz have in common with China? Considering the geographical distance and the historical and cultural differences, it would seem not much. And yet Mickiewicz’s voice reached the Far East as far back as the early twentieth century. How did this happen?
Czytaj więcejAnti-Imperially: Russia
As one of the first intellectuals in modern Europe, Mickiewicz experienced the oppressive force of the police state first-hand – he grappled with the long shadow of the empire throughout his life. He was also among the first to identify the threat despotism posed to the free world. His diagnoses of the Russian Empire, in poetry and elsewhere, were astonishingly insightful, and from today’s perspective, even prescient. By the same token, his approach was a far cry from uncompromising dogmatism: he sought seeds that could sprout into future change or indicate paths to reconciliation. Where are these to be found?
Adam Mickiewicz & the Beginnings of the ‘Petersburg Text’ of Russian Literature
Alexander Pushkin’s fantastical epic The Bronze Horseman marked a whole new epoch in Russian literature, ushering in a movement that created masterworks from Gogol and Dostoyevsky to Blok, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova. What does Mickiewicz have to do with this?
Czytaj więcejThe Poet as an Imperiologist: What Mickiewicz Knew About Russia
The brutal policies of the Russian Empire marked the poet’s entire life, as well as his nation’s history. What did Mickiewicz know about Russia – and how does this knowledge remain relevant?
Czytaj więcejAlexander Blok in Warsaw: The ‘Polish Poem’ of Russian Literature
How a stay in Warsaw and a father’s funeral became the source of a poem the famous Russian poet wrote for his entire life, in which anti-imperial tones and even Polish messianism rise up from the depths of the unconscious.
Czytaj więcejPolitically: Action
Mickiewicz’s poetry was a way of acting and transforming the world. This was indeed its effect, as proven by generations of its readers – Polish conspirators and fighters for ‘our freedom and yours’. Across his whole life, he got involved in a range of activities – through politics, journalism, lecturing – in which he saw potential tools for changing and influencing reality. And although Mickiewicz did not see the fruits of his work in his lifetime – an independent, multicultural Poland or Europe as a federation of sovereign and solidary states – these aims were achieved after some time. What was Mickiewicz’s role in these processes?
‘Hail, dawn of freedom’ – Mickiewicz & the National Uprising
Can poetry inspire a national uprising? How and when literature in Poland began to conspire.
Czytaj więcejThe Only True Wallenrods
Konrad Wallenrod triggered a massive wave of Polish biographies, in which Wallenrod’s ideals of a struggle for the homeland by all means necessary became a credo to live by. Some of those Wallenrods perfectly embodied traits of the original. Were there also any who came close to achieving his primary aim – that of destroying the mighty Empire from within?
Czytaj więcej‘Let your Spirit descend’ – Mickiewicz & the Church
Mickiewicz’s efforts to influence the politics and outlook of the Catholic Church in his lifetime came to nothing. He himself, during a memorable audience at the Vatican, was silenced by the head of the Church. And yet, albeit with a delayed effect, the poet’s voice was heard by the Church. What has the Catholic Church taken from Mickiewicz?
Czytaj więcejBooks of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People & a United Europe
How a piece of Polish messianism went on to inspire the central work of modern Ukrainian national consciousness. And how the latter work is still relevant in our day – at a moment of existential crisis for the Ukrainian state and the project of the European community.
Czytaj więcejChanging the World: Today!
Mickiewicz’s life, work and way of being in the world allow us to pose some vital questions in terms of our present-day global challenges: What does it mean to act? To change and fix the world? To stage resistance against mightier forces and authoritarian powers? And how might this be done effectively – through literature and activism? Where to find the strength for our actions and the faith that our aims can be achieved? Finally: When do we decide that our work has succeeded? Today? In a year? In 200 years?