‘Forefathers’ Eve’ – Adam Mickiewicz | #language & literature

Adam Mickiewicz’s arch-drama, the most mature, rich and ambiguous work of Polish Romanticism, ‘Forefathers’ Eve’, brave in artistic terms, is a complex piece of literature, demanding deeper reflection. Definitely not an easy read, it has the potential for enormous interpretative possibilities, which is where subsequent theatre-makers see their chance.

Adam Mickiewicz wrote Forefathers’ Eve (Dziady) between 1820 and 1832. He published Parts II and IV, the so-called ‘Dziady of Vilnius and Kraków’ (1823) in volume 2 of his Poezje (Poetry). After the poet’s death, the work was expanded with an unfinished fragment of Part I, titled ‘Widowisko’ (The Spectacle). The ‘Dresden Dziady’ (1832), constituting Part III, was in turn published in Paris as the fourth volume of Poetry in a collected edition and a year later in a separate edition.

The inconsistency of the numbering of the individual sequences is puzzling, as is their flickeringly variable character. A folk ritual (Part II) turns into a love drama (Part IV), then into a political mystery (‘Prologue’, opening scenes of Part III), combined with bitter satire (‘Salon warszawski’ [A Salon in Warsaw]) or grotesque (‘Pan Senator’ [The Senator]), up to an epic poem (‘Ustęp’ [Passages]). In the interweaving of various tonalities, the author revealed a perversity characteristic of the literary tendencies of his time.

The sufferings of young Gustaw

Widzenie Księdza Piotra. W środku Józef Duriasz (Ksiądz Piotr). "Dziady" Adama Mickiewicza w układzie tekstu i reżyserii Kazimierza Dejmka, Teatr Narodowy w Warszawie, premiera: 25 listopada 1967 roku, fot. Franciszek Myszkowski — ‘Forefathers’ Eve’, directed by Kazimierz Dejmek, Narodowy Theatre, Warsaw, premiered 25 November 1967, photo: Franciszek Myszkowski

On the ideological and thematic level, the drama contains a moving vision of the martyrdom of Polish youth under the Russian partition and a review of the more or less correct attitudes of our compatriots towards the tsarist oppressors. We meet the main character as an unhappy lover close to committing suicide, whose will undergoes a historical revision. He goes through a spiritual metamorphosis – he abandons his former name, Gustaw, and, as Konrad, becomes the personification of the Promethean idea. His attitude, as a Pole and a Romantic, became the model of proper behaviour for decades to come, despite many voices of sober reason criticising the hero’s emotional rashness.

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Forefathers’ Eve: Part II. Chronologically the first, it was preceded by the ballad ‘The Phantom’ (Upiór). This part takes place in a cemetery chapel ‘around the time’ of All Souls’ Day with a group of people from nearby villages. The folk ritual of forefathers’ eve begins, led by the Warlock (Guślarz). The souls in purgatory are summoned, for the assembled people wish to alleviate their suffering. These include light, heavy and medium spirits. Towards the end of the rite, a Phantom unexpectedly appears, which, disregarding the incantations of the Warlock or the rest of the assembled people, heads towards the Shepherdess and points to her wounded heart. The peasants lead the Shepherdess out of the chapel. The Phantom stubbornly follows them.

The appearance of a mysterious being is explained in the poem ‘The Phantom’. Its protagonist is a soul wandering in the underworld, condemned for the sin of suicide to repeat its suffering among the living every year. It was caused by an unhappy love, as well as the necessity of remaining among people who did not understand him.

Forefathers’ Eve: Part IV. Chronologically the second, its story takes place on the evening of All Souls’ Day in the home of the Priest, who was once the tutor of the main character, Gustaw. The young man arrives strangely dressed as a Hermit, ‘dead for the world’. His personality was shaped by reading Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise and Goethe’s Sufferings of Young Werther. This literature turned him into an individualist, although it also prompted him to attempt suicide.

The love-mad hero has elevated his beloved Maryla. However, she (‘Woman! You thing of fluff! You flighty revel!’ trans. Charles Kraszewski), blinded by a ‘shining bubble of honours, empty inside’ (trans. PG), married a mighty lord. Gustaw, filled with amorous suffering and the anguish of jealousy, spends three hours in the rectory, accompanied by the glow of three fading candles. In the clash between the Priest, an advocate of common sense and conformity, and Gustaw, representing sentimental spiritualism, scholars of the period discover echoes of the dispute between the Classicists and the Romantics. They also stress the accuracy of Mickiewicz’s psychological study.

Forefathers’ Eve – The Spectacle: Part I. An unfinished work, the surviving fragment features the Virgin and Gustaw. They do not yet know each other, although they sense an affection emerging between them. Zofia Stefanowska wrote:

It is believed that the meeting of the pair of heroes took place during the forefathers’ eve ritual to which the villagers and the Warlock were drawn and that Part I was to depict the story of the love that breaks Gustaw. Having abandoned the publication of Part I, Mickiewicz prefaced Parts II and IV with the ballad ‘The Phantom’, about a young man who killed himself for love and does penance as a reanimating spirit, rising from his grave every year to relive love, separation and suffering; he also added a foreword in which he pointed to the folk sources of the ritual scene. ‘Dziady of Vilnius and Kaunas’ is the first such bold manifestation of the Romantic attitude to folklore, drawing not only poetic but also moral and social inspiration from folk beliefs (the radical pronouncement of the evil lord’s ghost in Part II). Part IV is a powerful love poem, given dramatic force by the Romantic individualist’s conflict with the world and the dilemma of his conscience.

The birth of Konrad

Forefathers’ Eve: Part III. [Unless stated otherwise, all quotations from Part III are from Forefathers, translated by Count Potocki of Montalk, London: Polish Cultural Foundation, 1968.] In a Basilian monastery in Vilnius converted into a state prison, a dispute over the fate of a sleeping prisoner takes place between the Night Spirits and the Angel. The latter declares that, by the will of higher powers, the prisoner is to decide his own fate in solitude and among his enemies. The sleeping man suddenly wakes up and places an inscription on the wall: ‘D.O.M. [Deo Optimo Maximo] Gustavus Obiit MDCCCXXIII Calendis Novembris’ – ‘Hic natus est Conradus MDCCCXXIII Calendis Novembris” [‘To God, Best and Greatest. Gustaw died 1823 on the first day of November’ – ‘Here Konrad was born 1823 on the first day of November’]. The Spirit adds a punch line: (‘O men! Each of you could, locked up alone, / By faith destroy and stablish many a throne!’).

Act I (the only one, in fact), scene I. On Christmas Eve, young patriots, imprisoned on Novosiltsev’s orders, gather in Konrad’s cell, having been let in by a Polish guard, the Corporal, a former Napoleonic soldier. Those gathered welcome Żegota, their new comrade in misery, who, amidst the latest news, reveals to them that Novosiltsev, who has just arrived from Warsaw and wishes to worm his way into the tsar’s favour, intends to uncover a great student conspiracy. It matters not that no such thing exists. None of those imprisoned are safe from now on. The clattering of the changing of the night guard at the gates interrupts their revelry. They disperse to their cells.

Scene II – ‘Improvisation’, often dubbed ‘the Great’. Konrad has devoted all the strength of his spirit to the feeling of love for his homeland. He wants to take over the reign of human souls from God in order to lead the Polish nation to victory. He is answered by silence. (‘He was a liar, who Thy name “Love” did call; / For Thou art only wisdom, that is all!’). Incited by the voices of the spirits on the left against the voices of caution of the spirits on the right, he launches an attack on divine power: ‘For I’ll shoot out a voice through all creation, / From generation unto generation, / I’ll scream, / Thou’rt not the Father of the world, but…’ The devil’s voice adds: ‘The Tsar!’ Konrad staggers and falls.

Scene III. A Bernardine friar, Friar Peter, arrives to bring spiritual relief to a prisoner convulsing in epileptic fits. Before the friar proceeds to exorcise the prisoner, Satan, speaking through the mouth of Konrad, prompts Rollison, who has been tortured during the investigation, from a distance to shorten his suffering by jumping out of a window. Under the influence of Friar Peter’s fervent prayers, the evil spirit finally leaves Konrad’s body. The judgment of the Archangels takes place upon him. One enumerates his sins, the other defends him: ‘He loved his nation, loved many, was not wary!’

Thumbnail — ‘Forefathers’ Eve’, directed by Konrad Swinarski, 1973, Helena Modrzejewska National Stary Theatre, photo: Andrzej Piotrowski / PAP

Scene IV. In a country house near Lviv, the young maiden Ewa prays for the suffering youth in Lithuania. She dedicates a separate prayer to the imprisoned poet whose poems she has been reading. She falls asleep. In her ‘Vision’, she sees the Virgin Mary with a smiling Jesus, who throws a garland of flowers at the dreaming woman. The luminous rose requests: ‘Press me to your breast’ (trans. Charles Kraszewski).

Scene V – ‘Friar Peter’s cell’. The humble religious friar, who has ‘confessed [his] nothingness’ to the Lord, receives the power to see the future fate of Poland. In the misfortunes of the nation, the innocent passion of the tormented Christ is renewed. However, a resurrectionist defender will appear (‘Tis Freedom’s Viceroy visible on earth!’), hidden under the Kabbalistic number ‘forty and four’.

Scene VI – Senator’s bedroom. The devils, together with Beelzebub himself, are gathered at the host’s bedside, discussing how to most effectively torment the executioner of Vilnius youth in his sleep. They send him honours and encouraging acts of tsarist recognition for his dedicated service in order to suddenly plunge him into the most severe pain of humiliation: ‘The Senator’s fallen from favour, from favour, from favour!’

Our folk like lava

Scene VII – ‘A Salon in Warsaw’. The voices of the patriots commemorating the sufferings of their homeland are intermingled with the platitudes of the generals, literati and officials loyal to the partitioning power. The latter bemoan Novosiltsev’s departure, as ‘there’s no one with the taste to stage a ball more’. The exquisite company listens impatiently to Adolf’s harrowing tale of the inhumanly tormented prisoner Cichowski, who has not betrayed anyone over the years. The writers conclude that such an unpleasant story cannot be the subject of a poet: ‘The pastoral is what we Slavs adore’. Wysocki recognises that despite everything:

The surface! Not the head! Our folk, I’m told
Is like lava, hard and nasty, dry and cold
Above, but there’s an inner fire which keeps
Its heat for centuries: let’s dive to those deeps!

Scene VIII – ‘The Senator’. In Novosiltsev’s house in Vilnius, one door from the ante-chamber leads to the room where the investigating committee is in session, the other to the rooms where the guests invited to the ball are gathering. Over after-dinner coffee, the Senator listens to the flattery and denunciations of the Doctor and Pelikan, two Poles who are sneaking into his favour, and the chamberlain Baykov. A blind Mrs Rollison, the mother of a prisoner cruelly tortured during the investigation, arrives with a letter of recommendation. She begs to see her son and to allow him to see his confessor, Friar Peter. The senator dismisses her with a hypocritical promise. Instead, he accedes to the Doctor’s and Pelikan’s suggestion (‘He is, on the third floor, he’ll enjoy the breeze…’) to open the windows in Rollison’s cell. Friar Peter is accused of spreading information about the violence used against the detainees. The slapped monk predicts imminent death for the Doctor, later also for Baykov.

‘The Ball’, subtitled ‘Scène Chantée’, begins. Panderers ingratiate themselves to those in power. Patriots forced to attend the ball offer passive resistance. A young Russian officer addresses the Decembrist Bestuzhev:

That they all curse us here’s no wonder;
For the last century or more
They’ve sent out here from Moscow yonder
The rottenest villains by the score.

Mrs Rollison, crazed with pain, bursts into the ballroom. News of her son’s tragedy has reached her (‘They’ve thrown him from on high, / From the window, on the pavement, on the hard stone / to die!’). Friar Peter comforts her that the prisoner has survived. After a thunderstorm, Pelikan bursts into the ballroom with the news that lightning has killed the Doctor and melted the silver roubles in his desk (contemporaries identified this character with Juliusz Słowacki’s stepfather, Professor August Bécu, who died in a similar way). Intimidated by the fulfilled prophecy, the Senator allows the monk to leave. In the doorway, Friar Peter passes Konrad, who is being led to his interrogation. He prophesies to him ‘an unknown, distant way’.

Wound on the forehead

Scene IX – ‘Forefathers’ Night’. Ghostly apparitions come out: the spectre of a traitor killed by lightning, pouring liquid silver unworthily acquired while alive from hand to hand (the Doctor) and an individual torn apart by black dogs whose body grows back together all the time (Baykov). The Warlock is left in the graveyard with a Woman who wants to see only one ghost – the one who once appeared at a forefathers’ ritual with a bloodstain on his chest and did not utter a word. From the direction of Vilnius, wagons are quickly approaching. In one of them, a deportee can be seen, wounded by ‘the nation’s enemies’, with a black scar on his forehead: ‘Tis his own doing, thus, again, / It can be only healed by death’. A woman pleads: ‘Ah, heal him, great God!’

As established by Stanisław Pigoń, the author refers to his own trauma from his youth in this fragment of the drama:

the investigating authorities […] required a separately written declaration from each student before one was released […] the signatory pledged to be a confidante of the tsarist political police. Mickiewicz also wrote out such a declaration and signed it with his own hand. […] The monstrous idea of Novosiltsev’s inquisitors forced their colleagues to denounce themselves and imposed on everyone the duty of being a snitch, which must have left a residue of disgust and contempt for themselves in the signatories, the obliged helpers of the ‘police bastards’.

Such was the dishonouring obligation the poet accepted; he signed a pact with a political devil. We are justified in assuming that this act, or even the very fact that he allowed himself to be forced to commit it, weighed on his sensitive and righteous national conscience as a sign of weakness, as an indelible stigma of guilt, as a transgression that burdened the rest of his life and was to follow him with infamy beyond death. He could therefore view it as an act of suicide, aimed at the very essence of his personality. In Konrad’s case, the poetic expression of this recognition and acknowledgement of guilt may have been the incurable wound on his forehead, which was ‘his own doing’.

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Anti-tsarist pamphlet

‘Passages’, the conclusion of the drama, is dedicated ‘To My Muscovite friends’. The Pilgrim, as Konrad is called here, appears among a group of young exiles deep inside Russia. Parts of this poem, ‘The Road to Russia’, ‘Suburbs of the Capital’, ‘Petersburg’, ‘The Statue of Peter the Great’, ‘A Review of the Troops’ and ‘Oleszkiewicz’, make up an elaborate anti-tsarist pamphlet. The tsar’s subjects live in barbaric conditions degrading human dignity. The descriptions of the signs of tyranny are accompanied by a historiosophical reflection that raises the question of the chance to overthrow despotism. The aspirations for freedom of the Russians are personified by the poet of this nation in ‘The Statue of Peter the Great’ (identified with Pushkin or Ryleyev), as well as the Decembrists mentioned in the poem ‘To My Muscovite Friends’ (Ryleyev and Bestuzhev). In the poem ‘Oleszkiewicz’, the Pilgrim encounters the Warlock, a Pole who is said to ‘converse with spirits’ (trans. Charles Kraszewski), and listens to his prophecy on the eve of the flood in St Petersburg on 7 November 1824: ‘The Lord will shake the grounds of the city of Babylon’ (trans. PG).

Czesław Miłosz, in his essay ‘Mickiewicz and Modern Poetry’, noted that:

Before Mickiewicz attained a quiet tone in his epic, he went through divergent modes of expression. Some parts of ‘The Forefathers’ and ‘Faris’ are marked by a turbulent tone far removed from that of either his earlier or his later writings. Other parts of ‘The Forefathers’, such as scenes of political depravity and a long digression descriptive of tsarist Russia that ends the drama, rank among the scanty examples of poetry that combines strength with political insight. We live in an era of concentration camps, and many a representative of the nineteenth century seems a little childish today, but not Mickiewicz. No poet of France or England is so politically terrifying. He has suffered and he has seen his people suffer – that is the explanation. Characteristically, in his most poignant poems he presents or paints rather than makes a direct appeal.

The historical context meant that Forefathers’ Eve could not appear on stage in its full splendour for many years. The censorship’s interference, however, did not prevent the bard’s words from appealing to the audience with a special, heightened force. In the work’s stage readings, various exponents of power, guarding the currently acceptable ideological and political option, invariably find threats to their ‘exclusive’ legitimacy. The author seems to have foreseen this, as the prophetic words of Friar Peter amply testify:

If we suffer Power, say not, that we obey it.
God sometimes in most evil hands doth lay it.

(trans. Potocki of Montalk)

The famous staging of Forefathers’ Eve directed by Kazimierz Dejmek at the Narodowy Theatre in 1967 became a pretext for the brutal suppression of spontaneous protests by the patriotic part of the intelligentsia against the decisions of the then authorities. The removal of this performance from the stage triggered the so-called March events of 1968.

A breath of freedom was restored in the communist era by Konrad Swinarski’s brilliant 1973 version of Forefathers’ Eve at Kraków’s Stary Theatre. Konrad’s rebellion (the director depicted him as an epileptic), in the unique interpretation of Jerzy Trela, perfectly appealed to the imagination of the audience, who identified with the main character.

The political oppression of the communist era was – paradoxically – conducive to a more emotional, committed reading of Forefathers’ Eve. However, after 1989, in a Poland that has finally reclaimed independence, the director of this masterpiece of Romanticism still does not have an easy task. In 2021, Maja Kleczewska, the author of the staging at the J. Słowacki Theatre in Kraków, could see this for herself, as Jan Bończa-Szabłowski wrote in Rzeczpospolita (6 June 2022):

Kleczewska’s ‘Forefathers’ Eve’, which was created in Kraków, also goes beyond the traditional reading of the work. The director consistently inscribed them into our reality […] it was created in the times of the ‘hell of Polish women’. So the protagonists here are women. Those bludgeoned on marches await interrogation in police stations like Mickiewicz-type students in cells. In this story, Konrad is also a woman. A strong woman, not a militant one like Marta Lempart but a quiet one like Janina Ochojska. The excellent Dominika Bednarczyk, supported on crutches like the president of the Polish Humanitarian Action [Polska Akcja Humanitarna], cries out to God for the government of souls, to claim the rights of the weak, the wronged and the marginalised. She truly feels ‘for the whole nation’s doom,/ Like a mother for the pains of the fruit of her womb.’ It is a moving role and one that deserves the highest praise. […] ‘Forefathers’ Eve’, which I call Kleczewska’s, is controversial, and there is much to discuss, which is a task for our teachers. The ban sent to schools by a person who has not seen the play [the education superintendent of the Lesser Poland region at the time] is some kind of grotesque. And, above all, it shows a lack of understanding of a nation that, thanks to its complicated history, has rebellion running in its blood.

The context of the eternal struggle between the forces of good and evil means that a well-staged drama by Mickiewicz is capable of touching the most sensitive strings of our souls. Its essence is the communal experience of all the participants in the performance: audience and performers. This is why all attempts to interfere in the matter of ritual community from the outside seem doomed to failure.

Over the decades, a gigantic bibliography has grown around Forefathers’ Eve. New generations of scholars continue to discover previously unknown aspects of the great drama. They are so firmly rooted in the Polish historical and national context that in other cultural areas they unfortunately lose their legibility. Janusz Majcherek and Tomasz Mościcki [Kryptonim ‘Dziady’: Teatr Narodowy 1967–1968 (Cryptonym ‘Forefathers’ Eve’: Narodowy Theatre 1967–1968), Warsaw 2018] gave several examples cited by Radio Free Europe of the reception of the so-called March 1968 events by the Western press:

Only a few [newspapers] did not twist Mickiewicz’s name and the title of his work. Apart from the fact that some newspapers in England mixed up a certain Stanisław Mackiewicz with Adam Mickiewicz, the Italian press translated the title ‘Dziady’ with a truly shambolic gesture. Thus the ‘Corriere della Sera’ explained to its readers that our bard’s work was called ‘Old Men’. […] ‘Il Tempo’ translated the word ‘Dziady’ as ‘Beggars’. Other newspapers are still split between it being a feast of the dead and a funeral meal. The London ‘Daily Mirror’, however, broke all records of erudition by twisting the word ‘Dziady’ into ‘Daddy’.

Anna Baltyn-Karpińska, on the other hand, in her text on Forefathers’ Eve [Iskier Leksykon Dramatu (Spark: Lexicon of Drama), Warsaw 2008], quoted a short biography of the poet from The Cambridge Guide to Theatre:

Polish poet and playwright. From 1823 he stayed in Russia, Germany, Italy and France as a Polish émigré dedicated to reclaiming Poland’s freedom. His visionary work about suffering and Poland’s messianic destiny, ‘Forefathers’ Eve’ (1823), staged in 1901, is a hallowed national drama with the structure of a dream. His ideas about monumental theatre based on Greek tragedy, medieval mysteries and ancient folklore had a lasting influence on Polish theatre directors.

Of the four sentences of the English vade mecum, only the first and last needed no correction by the author. For although Mickiewicz was indeed an émigré from his homeland, his sentencing after the trial of the Philomaths and Philarets in 1824 to stay in the Russian Empire’s ‘governorates far from Poland’ must not be equated with the poet’s sojourn in Western European countries. Besides, the aforementioned description of Forefathers’ Eve focuses exclusively on its Part III, although it gives the publication date of Parts II and IV.

However, as Anna Dymna recalls, there were also situations like this:

One unforgettable experience I had was seeing Stary Theatre’s ‘Forefathers’ Eve’, directed by Konrad Swinarski, abroad. The play took place in a Gothic cathedral in London. I remember performances with black people crying with emotion. After all, they didn’t understand a word of the national drama played in Polish, which was very hermetic for foreigners. Something unusual happened – the language barriers disappeared. Everyone was gripped by the mood, the tension and the unique magic of the theatre.

Forefathers’ Eve is literature that is still gaining ground, and its road is paved with many more rewarding discoveries, in the areas of research, as literature and as theatre. Get ready, o chosen ones.

Written in Polish by Janusz R. Kowalczyk, last updated 23 June 2022

Translated by Patryk Grabowski