The epic poems of the ‘Digression’ crowned the dramatic Forefathers’ Eve. Part III. Here was another critique of Russia, and one differently executed. In this work, Russia is primarily presented as a place of the deportation, martyrology, and death of Polish heroes, the ‘martyrs of national cause’. On a spiritual plane, Russia was depicted as one of the sides in a great clash between nations and civilisations, in which freedom met despotism – a conflict which Mickiewicz saw in metaphysical terms.
Crucially, in writing his landmark drama, Mickiewicz made his main theme a police investigation, and the protagonists - a group of young students (friends from his youth). Today we would call them political prisoners and victims of an oppressive police state. The antagonist is the real-life figure of senator Nikolay Novosiltsev, a prototype for all over-zealous representatives of repressive police regime.
The political investigation is accompanied by torture, forced confessions, and suicides of the interrogated, prison sentences and exile – methods from the playbook of oppressive regimes by which a police state (here shown in its early evolution) breaks individuals and a society. At the same time, Mickiewicz shows how police methods, deprivation, and the evil of perpetrators poisons the victims of violence as well. This whole subject would be thoroughly explored only in the twentieth century, in an age of totalitarianism, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Mickiewicz was surely a pioneer here, as he diagnosed this phenomenon in its early, and still rather tentative phase.
Mickiewicz’s model of anti-imperial poetry discourse in Part III of Forefathers’ Eve did not fall on deaf ears. Despite the Tsar’s censorship (a ban on Mickiewicz’s poetic works was held throughout the Empire across the nineteenth century), his anti-imperial message made its mark on the work of many poets who represented conquered nations. Here we might mention only works from Taras Shevchenko’s ‘Three Year’ period, Antanas Baranauskas’s poem 'Road to Petersburg' or the work of Belarus’s most important poet of the latter half of the nineteenth century, Francišak Bahuševič. Writing their uncompromising poems, all of them, as citizens of the Empire, risked their lives. At the same time, they formed new strategies of resistance, beating a path to truth and freedom for their nations.
