Why Adam Mickiewicz’s friendship with Pushkin was difficult – Rossiyskaya Gazeta

In Poland, Adam Mickiewicz is considered the greatest Polish-language poet of the Romantic era. But to say that he wrote in pure Polish would be a mistake. Linguists believe that the Mickiewicz language is largely the language of the nobility of Belarus and Lithuania, which from the point of view of grammatical structure and lexical resource has many Belarusian elements. It is no coincidence that Belarusian literati consider Mickiewicz one of the founders of the new Belarusian literature; His works are included in the school literature curriculum in Belarus. He had a great influence on the formation of not only Polish, but also Belarusian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian literature. Partly, and Russian, if we talk about his very complex friendship with Pushkin.

Photo: RIA Novosti

In 1955, a 40 kopeck stamp was issued in the USSR depicting Pushkin and Mitskevich together and quoting Pushkin’s lines about his Polish comrade: “He spoke of the times to come, / When the peoples have forgotten their struggles, / They will unite in a big family…”

In the 1950s in the USSR it was important to emphasize the friendship between Russia and socialist Poland, which was part of the Warsaw bloc. But, in reality, these lines were taken from the context of Pushkin’s poem, directed precisely against Mickiewicz, who published in Paris a collection of political poetic satires, which also contained poems, as we would say today, of a “Russophobic” nature. Pushkin’s response poem sounded like a rebuke to Mickiewicz. It began like this: “He lived among us / Among a tribe foreign to him; In his soul he did not harbor any malice towards us, and we / We loved him…” Then followed those same words about the people who, “having forgotten their enmities, formed a great united family…” But, alas: “We listened avidly to the poet. He / He went west-and with blessings / We bid him farewell. But now / Our peaceful guest has become our enemy—and poison / The poems of him, for the sake of the violent mob, / Will make you drunk…”

Adam Mickiewicz had a very strange fate. He was born in the Novogrudok district of the Vilnius province of the Russian Empire into the family of an impoverished but high-born Lithuanian nobleman who worked as a lawyer in Novogrudok (now the territory of Belarus). Adam’s brother Alexander was the first professor at kyiv University, and Adam himself entered Vilnius University (now Vilnius University in Lithuania).

At the university, he became one of the main initiators of the creation of a secret circle of “philomata”, which pursued educational goals, but gradually leaned towards social and political tasks of national liberation. After graduating from university, he worked as a teacher in Kovno (now Kaunas).

In 1823 he was arrested in connection with the political trial against the “philomata” and “filarets”, organized in Vilnius by Senator NN Novosiltsev, sent especially for this purpose from St. Petersburg. The case was high-profile and involved more than 100 people, including university professors and former students. The punishment that befell Miscavige may seem astonishing today! He was exiled from the Kovno province… to St. Petersburg. In this way the fight against Polish-Lithuanian nationalism was carried out: they were expelled to Russia.

Mickiewicz lived in Saint Petersburg, then in Odessa, in Crimea, in Moscow… He was about to marry the poetess and translator Karolina Pavlova. He served in the office of the military governor general of Moscow. He became close to future participants in the Decembrist conspiracy KF Ryleev (later executed) and AA Bestuzhev. And he became friends with a wide range of Russian poets, especially Peter Vyazemsky, who translated his “Crimean Sonnets” into Russian.

Pushkin also translated Mickiewicz. His translation of Mitskevich’s ballad “Budrys and His Children” is considered classic. The ballad takes place in the Middle Ages. Old Litvin Budrys invites his three sons to undertake one of the campaigns: to Novgorod, where they can capture rich loot, to the lands of the Teutonic Order, rich in amber and precious fabrics, or to Poland. The latter, according to him, is poor, but Polish girls are the most beautiful in the world. One after another, the sons return from the campaign and it turns out that they all went to Poland in search of brides. At the end of the ballad, Budrys prepares to perform three weddings at once.

It is curious that the first interlinear translation of the ballad was published by Thaddeus Bulgarin, a successful Russian journalist, author of the first Russian novel “Ivan Vyzhigin”, Polish by origin (Jan Tadeusz Krzysztof) and former captain of the Napoleonic army. , which was captured by the Russians.

In 1828, Mickiewicz emigrated to Europe and published a series of poetic satires containing very unflattering statements about Russia and, in particular, St. Petersburg. There is a version, although it is not entirely certain, that Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” is a detailed response to Mickiewicz’s poems about St. Petersburg and personally about Peter the Great: “Monument to Peter the Great”, “Petersburg “, “Review”. of the Troops”, and others.

Among Mitskevich’s poems about St. Petersburg, a city, as he believes, built by the capricious will of an evil tsar and almost at the expense of the robbery of Poland (!), and Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman” with its complex and Also ambiguous attitude towards Peter, there is certainly some kind of connection, but quite subtle. Let us leave this to the discretion of literary scholars.

In 1855, Mickiewicz went to Constantinople, contracted cholera, and died. In 1890, Adam Mickiewicz’s ashes were transported to Poland, to Krakow, and placed in a sarcophagus in Wawel Cathedral.