The new school of writing
As another writer, poet, and insurgent, Edward Dembowski, aptly put it, in writing ‘Ode to Youth’ and Konrad Wallenrod, Mickiewicz ‘created a new way of writing in Poland. Through it he led the nation’s route toward progress’.
Indeed, in totally different ways, both these works – ‘Ode’ through its direct sublime call for embodying an ideal in life, Konrad Wallenrod through its veiled call for revenge – transformed Polish literature and its relationship to life. Literature in Poland was thereafter politics, and revolutionary action was poetry.
Mochnacki also expressed this spirit, when he wrote:
Time to finally stop writing about art. We now probably have something else in our heads and hearts. We improvised the most gorgeous poem of the National Uprising! Our life is now poetry. The rattle of arms and the roar of the cannon. From now on, that will be our rhythm and melody.
From then on, literature was to be much more than writing that reflected reality – as Mochnacki wrote, it was to let ‘the nation perceive its own essence’. Through Mickiewicz, that great politician in literature, it was also to shape Polish history, and whole biographies as well, often deciding on human life and death.
Author: Mickołaj Gliński, November 2023. Translated by Soren Gauger.
