It is the usual assumption that a literature course at an Anglo-American university with “Romanticism” in its descriptor will deal almost exclusively with the sensibility’s British iteration. “Contextual engagement,” when it does occur, may simply be limited to synopses of German Romantic philosophy, and this largely because of its impact on the former (for the most part mediated to boot) (see Abrams). Otherwise, as David Higgins suggests, one might (although, we would argue, one should) envision a separate course devoted to “European Romanticism,” in which British texts are treated holistically alongside representative texts from the Continent (50). This, however, may not always be feasible. What we propose, then, is an approach that would thicken the study of Romanticism in an Anglo-American setting without the investment of time and effort (or even competence) that this might otherwise require. To this end, we would like to suggest that perhaps the most consequential text of Polish literary Romanticism, Adam Mickiewicz’s verse drama Forefathers’ Eve, part 3, and in particular scene 2, the so-called Great Improvisation, be used at once to plumb and epitomize those most salient aspects of the Romantic Weltanschauung in what René Wellek would call its “unity” that we want to impress on our students (160–61). In this way, moreover, rather than just synopsizing, the exemplary text actually performs Romanticism in and as poetry—which is precisely what the Jena Romantics had invoked in theory but never really achieved in practice (see Schlegel 31–2).

At the end of this article, we offer a few suggestions for implementing our ideas about Mickiewicz’s text in the classroom.

As all of his contemporaries recognized immediately upon its appearance, Mickiewicz’s debut volume of poetry in 1821, Ballady i romanse (Ballads and Romances), marked the ascendance of the Romantic sensibility in Poland. And arguably the high point of Polish Romanticism was the publication eleven years later of Mickiewicz’s drama in verse Forefathers’ Eve, part 3, which he wrote in response to the defeat of Poland’s uprising against Russia in 1831 and the subsequent emigration of its best and brightest to Western Europe, himself included. As a chapter in the poet’s symbolic autobiography, it also served as a form of compensatory atonement for Mickiewicz’s own failure to participate in the uprising. Set in 1823, during the persecution of Polish students in Vilnius (Mickiewicz among them) by the tsarist authorities, the drama chronicles the transformation of the Romantic poet-forlorn lover Gustaw, the protagonist of Mickiewicz’s pre-insurrectionary Forefathers’ Eve, part 4 (1823), ⁽¹⁾ into Konrad, a national poet-avenger whose soul becomes a battlefield for forces of (Satanic) evil and (angelic) good. ⁽²⁾ Played out across ten scenes that shift in time and space, much like the medieval mystery plays that in part inspired it, the drama culminates in a vision of Poland as a Christ of Nations, crucified by the three partitioning powers, and of a mysterious messianic figure who will one day redeem it. ⁽³⁾ At the very center of the drama is the so-called Great Improvisation, in which Konrad qua poet challenges God for the right to make his nation happy. In doing so, he enacts in poetry the quintessence of Romantic sensibility. Here one has the valorization of intuition over empirical knowledge, inspiration over reason, and sentiment over wisdom; the overcoming of the split within the self—but also between the self and the nation—through the creative power of poetry; a theomachic struggle; and, ultimately, an apotheosis of the poet as crown of creation. By the same token, the Improvisation is but one of a willful scramble of genres that constitute Forefathers’ Eve, part 3, from aforesaid mystery play to the scène historique and opera, from visionary lyric to no less visionary epic, and all shot through with both pathos and bathos as prophetic mysticism shifts abruptly into satiric grotesquerie and realism into flights of fantasy. Little wonder, then, that in her 1839 essay on what she calls “le drame fantastique” George Sand describes Forefathers’ Eve as the consummate realization of the Romantic drama, in line with—and even transcending—Goethe’s Faust and Byron’s Manfred. Her sentiments have been echoed by generations of critics since (see Sand; Weintraub 152–93; Segel 36–45).

One need only look at the publication date of Forefathers’ Eve, part 3—1832—to begin to grasp Sand’s take on the matter. In a word, what we are dealing with here is “belatedness.” As John Neubauer points out in a brief essay on the question of periodizing East-Central European literatures, “With the possible exception of Constructivism, all the literary periods and movements in post-1800 East-Central Europe have been imported from Western Europe—with a time lag that complicates attempts to define both the terms themselves and their function within the receiving culture” (321). Mickiewicz himself, in fact, had been acutely aware of this lag—“an entire century,” he quipped with exasperation—on the part of Polish literature vis à vis even (albeit at the time imperially cosmopolitan) Russia, where, as he wrote in 1827, “every novel by Walter Scott is immediately in circulation, [and] every new work of philosophy is already in bookstores,” while Poles were still translating “Legouvé, Delille, and […] Millevoye” (Dzieła 14:426–27). In Neubauer’s estimation, however, this “‘lag’” has in fact “been useful to East-Central European literatures” insofar as they “have managed to turn the frustration of ‘belatedness’ into a creative assimilation (reconstruction) of particular European trends” (322).

This process is informed by two interconnected phenomena: on the one hand, it is made possible by what Virgil Nemoianu calls “telescoping,” wherein “one stage [of literary development] seems to absorb […] others” simultaneously “over a relatively short period of time” (122); that same telescope, as it were, is then used to take a retrospective glance, providing the “belated” culture with the capacity to reflect on, reappraise, and systematize models—in our case, above all German Romanticism and Byronism—that have already inscribed it irrevocably. In doing so, it at once distills and epitomizes the essential features of the models—but in the best of cases, may also augment and/or reconfigure them. It is in this sense that Forefathers’ Eve, part 3, proves to be a truly invaluable tool for any teacher trying to impart the notion of Romanticism in an undergraduate program.

One might object at this point that all of that reflecting on, reappraising, systematizing, distilling, and epitomizing are just so many euphemisms for epigonism. Viewed interculturally, as but one of many literary reflexes of “high” Romanticism, Forefathers’ Eve is indeed epigonic. ⁽⁴⁾ Within the context of Polish culture, however, Mickiewicz had no antecedent; he was, as all who came after him agreed, “the first and the greatest,” himself the progenitor of generations of epigones (see Zielińska; Janion). The poet Evgenii Baratynskii captured these two aspects of Mickiewicz’s profile well when at a farewell party thrown in the Polish poet’s honor by his Russian friends in 1828, he declaimed in “Ne podrazhai” [“Don’t Imitate”]:

Don’t imitate: a genius is singular

And great by dint of his own greatness […].

When I find you, O inspired Mickiewicz,

At Byron’s feet, I think: Abased admirer!

Get up! Get up and know that you yourself are god! (1:155)5

To be sure, the word epigone does not have the best of reputations: imitative, unoriginal, influenced, lacking in talent, by definition belated. But precisely because the epigonic product “is always subordinate to something (or someone) else,” it has the capacity, as Shlomo Berger and Irene Zwiep argue, to demonstrate “a condition in culture, a spirit of the area, a trend in the arts, philosophy or any other human occupation” (2); less revolutionary than the work of pioneers, the epigone’s “thus offers a clearer view of the cultural codes and tastes of an epoch” (4). If Forefathers’ Eve, part 3, is thus indeed epigonic, it is so in the very best sense—or, to be exact, senses—of the word. ⁽⁵⁾

The cultural codes that Mickiewicz’s drama wears as if on its sleeve may have first taken shape in 1773, in the five essays of Von deutscher Art und Kunst, a volume Todd Kontje rightly identifies as “mark[ing] the beginnings of European Romanticism” (66). The contributions of its editor, Johann Gottfried Herder, proved particularly influential. In his encomia to Shakespeare and Ossian, Herder managed not only to codify the Romantic image of the poet we still recognize today—the genius fated to loneliness, who is, by the same token, “the creator of the nation around him” (8:415)—but just as importantly, to advance a “new aesthetic” premised on “a series of binary oppositions that value the primitive over the modem, feeling over form, the spoken over the written word, and nature over art” (Kontje 66). This new aesthetic, which broke so radically with (and indeed, defined itself against) the ideals of the Enlightenment, is crystallized on the very title page of Mickiewicz’s drama.

By naming his work after the ancient feast of Dziady, the night on which pagan Slavs had ritually honored the souls of their departed ancestors, Mickiewicz reorients his modern Polish audience toward the “primitive” pre-Christian roots of their culture that were still in evidence, ostensibly, among the Volk of his time in his little corner of the Balto-Slavic world. ⁽⁶⁾ He thus reminds Poles—in true Romantic fashion—how alienated they had become from the wellsprings of their identity, while at the same time suggesting the path for reconnecting with it. ⁽⁷⁾ Moreover, by foregrounding the pre-Christian—and, therefore, pre-literate, pre-rational, and animistic—roots of his culture, Mickiewicz’s title also signals a reorientation toward the spoken word, toward affect, and toward the natural world. The second half of the work’s title informs us that this is the third part of a cycle the publication of earlier parts of which had helped establish Mickiewicz as Poland’s foremost exponent of the Romantic sensibility. It does not, however, follow parts 1 and 2; he had written parts 2 and 4 some ten years earlier, between 1820 and 1822; and although he began working on part 1 at about the same time, he never did finish it (what there is of it was published only posthumously). This mystifying anachrony is, of course, itself an implicit critique of reason and artistic harmony. In short, the title’s “Romanticism” is thoroughly overdetermined. But how is the paradigmatic shift it heralds manifested in the play itself?

Just as the shuffled arrangement of the Forefathers’ Eve cycle brings its Romantic spirit to the surface, so too does the very form of part 3. The Romantic movement’s emphases on orality, spontaneity, affect, and irrationality are evident in the play’s many digressive visions and dreams, but above all in its dramatic centerpiece, the (Great) Improvisation. ⁽⁸⁾ The Improvisation’s “generic marker” evokes an issue central to the Romantic project, namely, the “definition of ‘good poetry’ [according to Wordsworth, for one] as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’” (Esterhammer 321; see also Weintraub). In doing so, it at the same time highlights, to quote Angela Esterhammer again, the “intrinsic difficulty in the idea of representing immediacy or putting spontaneity on display” (322). After all, Konrad’s “improvisation” begins after his cellmates from the previous scene have fled and with the poet-protagonist’s exclamation, “(after a long silence),” “Solitude!” ⁽⁹⁾ Mickiewicz in effect calls into question the ontological status of his, the putative improviser’s, audience (and therefore of the thing itself): if not diegetic, is it supposed to be (potentially) theatric? or is this Mickiewicz’s way of figuring—and hence legitimating in a very Romantic way—that “Moment” “within” which “the Poet’s Work is [was!] Done”? (Blake 126) ⁽¹⁰⁾

Whatever its ontological status, this thing called the Improvisation is itself rife with Romantic tropes. We find our poet recovering from a swoon. The dark night around him mirrors his emotional state in what can only be called a textbook example of that most Romantic of literary devices, the pathetic fallacy (see Logan). And it is the natural world, and the immanent Spirit, that heed the poet, while man turns a deaf ear to his song:

Song, thou dost not need earthly eyes nor ears

In my soul’s cavern flow,

On her heights shine and glow.

Like subterraneous streams, like stars beyond the spheres!

Thou Nature, and thou, God! take heed and hear5

Music and singing worthy of you ear! (166/3:157)

But if God hears, he fails—or is it refuses?—to respond. Here Mickiewicz develops the theme of theomachy, familiar from works by Byron as well as Shelley (see Schock 86–112), and uses it to reconfigure and reinforce the Romantic binary of heart vs. mind, love vs. wisdom:

Thou keepest silence! I know now, I have seen Thee,

Such as Thou art, and how Thou rulest, ween Thee;

He was a liar, who Thy name “Love” did call;

For Thou art only wisdom, that is all!

By thought, not heart, keys of thy ways are bought:5

Men find Thy armories, not by heart, but thought! (172/3:162)

Yet unlike Byron’s Manfred or Cain, Gustaw-Konrad is no mere rebel angel, content with evading God’s moral tyranny. Mickiewicz does not strip the theomachic trope of its “Satanic” accouterments, but rather transcends them. In his role as creator, Mickiewicz’s poet aspires to complete parity with, if not superiority to, the Lord Creator:

My song is great, my singing is Creation!

For such a song is strength: is more than strong.

True immortality is such a song!

I feel immortal, deathlessly create!

What couldst Thou greater do, O God so great! (167/3:158)5

Here Mickiewicz draws in unusually clear and brazen terms an analogy with deep roots in both European and English Romantic thought, “an analogy,” as Northrop Frye defines it, “between God and man as creators, between God’s Word and the poet’s word, between God’s revelation in the Scriptural myth and the poet’s revelation, which for most Romantics was also a distinctively mythopoeic revelation” (23). M. H. Abrams traces it, through Schlegel’s writings on Shakespeare, back to the Renaissance: “What Schlegel did, in effect, was to give new application to the Renaissance metaphor of the poet as creator, with its implicit analogy between God’s creation of the world and the artist’s making of a poem” (239). Schlegel’s adoption of this analogy “opened the way for the introduction into criticism of a rich stock of linked ideas” (Abrams 239). Mickiewicz has his poet work that stock of ideas out in verse:

My powers spring from that same shrine

Whence Thou, God, drewest Thine […]. (170/3:160)

Notably, the poet spends less time describing the actual source of his creative strength than he does rejecting the usual sources; his discourse is apophatic, not only expressing the rejection of reason, but also performing it in its very structure:

Not from the tree of Eden comes my power; not

From knowledge of good and evil, is it got,

Not from books nor tales nor dreams

Nor yet from solving themes,

No, not from magic schemes! (170/3:160)5

What our creator seeks to create is more than poetry:

My heart with a great Folk on earth is kin,

By me stands many an army, power and Throne…

And if I should blaspheme

I’ll give Thee a bloodier fight than the Lord of Sin;

I challenge on the heart! He but with brains did scheme!5

[…]

My name is “Million”—since for millions, oh, alack!

I love, and suffer the rack,

I gaze on my poor land and feel

Like a son whose father is bound on a wheel.

I feel for the whole nation’s doom,10

Like a mother for the pains of the fruit of her womb—

I suffer, whilst Thou, wise and gay, dost loom,

Governest ever […]. (174–75/3:163–64)

This observation brings us back to Herder’s notion of the poet as nation-builder—and to the historically determined distinctiveness of Polish Romanticism—for Gustaw-Konrad’s personal agony is inextricably bound to the agony of his nation. What’s more, the poet’s affective identification with his nation was, in the Polish case, uniquely reciprocal. The Great Improvisation serves to illustrate not only the impulse behind Shelley’s dictum about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but also its practicability; what for the English reader would always already remain a rhetorical gesture, became, in the eyes of a nation denied its right to exist, a guarantee—indeed, an acknowledgement—of its survival.

In the absence of the institutions and processes that constitute an independent state, the vision at the heart of Forefathers’ Eve, part 3—of a Poland as the Christ of Nations, sent to redeem mankind from tyranny—came to serve as a(n overcompensatory) simulant for political thought, while the poet who articulated it “was,” according to Czesław Miłosz, “hailed as a charismatic leader, the incarnation of the collective strivings of peoples,” whose “biography, not only … work, entered the legend” (203). Indeed, by conflating in one grand, Romantically utopian gesture word and deed, poetics and politics, Mickiewicz succeeded in fostering a cult of Romantic martyrdom that, in the words of Isaiah Berlin, ascribes “value [to] martyrdom as such, no matter what the martyrdom [is] martyrdom for” (9). He had legislated “an outlook,” to quote Berlin once again, “in which the state of mind, the motive, is more important than the consequence, the intention is more important than the effect” (10). It is thus in this sense too that Forefathers’ Eve, part 3, fulfills Schlegel’s requisite for Romantic poetry, to “make … life and society poetical [das Leben und die Gesellschaft poetisch machen]” (Berlin 31)—or, as Mickiewicz’s poet-creator puts it, “create my nation like a living song” (Berlin 171)—but it does so as a warning: be careful what you wish for.