Parts II and IV, the so-called "Vilnius-Kaunas" Forefathers (a draft for Part I was discovered posthumously) demonstrated Romanticism "in action" for a literary culture that was still largely dominated by Classicist aesthetics. The action of Part II draws on a Belorusian folk rite in honour of the dead, when the spirits are summoned to commune with the living, and this ceremony is conducted (in a innovation by Mickiewicz) by the figure of the "guslarz" or village wizard. In Part IV, a Hermit comes to the home of a Uniate priest, and delivers a long monologue on his wretched life. He turns out to be Gustav, an old pupil, and perhaps even a ghost himself. His ultimate purpose is to plead with the priest not to interfere in the folk rite.

Part III, which is artistically and structurally more complex, received fulsome praise from Georges Sand (1839): "since the fears and imprecations of the prophets of Zion no voice had been raised with such power to sing so vast a theme as that of the fall of a nation". The starting point is Mickiewicz's own biography: its central character, Gustav, who takes the name "Konrad", is, like Mickiewicz, a victim of Tsarist oppression in Vilnius in the early 1820s. It is over Konrad's soul, and, by extension, the soul of Poland, that the greater forces of Good and Evil are waging a titanic struggle. As he awaits trial in his cell, Konrad questions the existence of divine justice, given the monumental crime against Poland. His blasphemous conclusion is that God is, in fact, the Devil (identified with the Tsar). However, he is saved from damnation by Father Peter, who leads him to understand the need for expiation and suffering, introducing ideas which Mickiewicz was to expand upon in the Books of the Polish Pilgrimage and Nation (1832), specifically that Poland was the "Christ of Nations", whose collapse was a necessary sacrifice in the moral regeneration of Europe. The Vilnius scenes are complemented by a series of realistic, satirical scenes set in Warsaw, showing sections of Polish society collaborating with the Russian oppressor.

What was to exercise the Russian censors particularly, however, was the "Digression", a series of long poems following the drama which depicted despotism in St. Petersburg in all its horror. The Monument of Peter the Great focuses on the human costs of Peter's great enterprise, a charge which stung Pushkin to respond with The Bronze Horseman (1833), whilst Review of the Army shows the dehumanisation caused by autocracy.

The Tsarist censorship's repression of Mickiewicz's works in earnest dates from the publication of Part III (a fact which was kept secret for several weeks to mislead Russian spies in Paris). Although the Russians had been alerted to the subversive nature of his earlier narrative poem, Konrad Wallenrod (1828 & 1829, St Petersburg), it was the open attack on autocracy which made Part III unpublishable in Russia or the Kingdom of Poland. Shortly after Part III went on sale (January 1833), it made its way into Russian Poland: on 6 March, the Government Commission for Internal and Religious Affairs and Public Education ordered searches to be conducted on the territory of the Kingdom itself. This initiated an unconditional ban on the work, extended to the Empire itself on 1 September. In December, the Petersburg Committee of Foreign Censorship confirmed the ban, defining the work as "an outpouring of poisonous bile against the Russian government and imperial family". Rewards were offered for handing in copies and fines imposed for possession, although the arbitrariness of Tsarist justice allowed for sentences of 25 years military service for individuals caught with the work.

In the period of liberalisation after the Crimean War, the possibility arose of publishing Mickiewicz openly. In the 8-volume Warsaw edition of 1857-58, Parts II & IV could find a place, but not the still "unconditionally banned" Part III. Instead it was published secretly around 1860 in lithograph form in Kiiv by students of the university, and in Petersburg. The first official publication of Part III occurred in the Austrian sector - Lviv (1885) and Cracow (1890) - where the Poles had enjoyed cultural and increasing political autonomy after the Ausgleich. In the Kingdom, even during the relative liberal period after the 1905 Revolution, the Russian censor Iwanowski could still justify confiscating a whole print run thus: "The poem is imbued with a desire for vengeance against, and profound hatred of, Russia, particularly of the Russian Tsar as the chief cause of the sufferings of the Polish nation" (Prussak, 138 - 39).

Forefathers became a politically contentious work again with the Soviet occupation of Polish territory at the start of WWII. The links that could be made between Tsarist and Soviet imperialism and oppression were obvious to the Communists. Accordingly, compilers and teachers of school readers stressed other elements: the social criticism in Part II and the pro-Russian sentiments of Part III's To My Russian Friends. The latter's differentiation of anti-Tsarist and anti-Russian sentiments was employed in propagating Polish-Soviet friendship . Certainly, in the face of Nazi destruction of Polish monuments across the border, the Soviets could at least pose as defenders of Polish culture.

These Soviet-inspired "politically correct" readings continued after the war, particularly during the Socialist Realist period (1948 - 55), when the Party's desire to exploit the national tradition as a source of legitimacy also applied to literature. In accordance with President Bierut's exhortations (January 1950) to "extract, reveal and bring out the real popular democratic, social and ideological bedrock of [Mickiewicz's] creative work", Party critics devised appropriate interpretations: "There is no hint of the ideology of passivity, expiation, sacrifice, grace. The drama exudes passion for the struggle. And this isn't altered by comparisons scattered throughout between the sufferings of the conspirators and those of Christ" Zolkiewski, 1952) The Censorship Office ensured the "political correctness" of introductions and commentaries to editions of Mickiewicz's works, wherein the unacceptable, "reactionary" elements would be explained away in class terms and, it hoped, neutralized.

The history of theatre productions of the work was almost as fraught as that of its publication. In the nineteenth century, a fragment of Part III was performed (1848) in Cracow. Only in 1901 in Cracow did a more complete production by the great "Young Poland" poet and dramatist, Stanislaw Wyspianski, take place. In newly independent Poland a flurry of performances of Forefathers' Eve celebrated national survival, but it was the left-wing director Leon Schiller (1887 - 1954) who was generally credited with reinventing the play as theatre in a series of productions throughout the 1930s (Lviv 1932, Vilnius 1933, Warsaw 1934, Sofia 1937). In post-war Poland, his dream of reviving the play foundered on Party caution about the nationalism inspiring Romantic works in the new political conditions of the Cold War: productions planned for 1948 and 1950 were dropped from the repertoire. It was not until 1955 that Bardini, one of Schiller's pupils, mounted the first major post-war production.

The most renowned production, directed in 1967 by Kazimierz Dejmek at the National Theatre in Warsaw, seemed to bear out the Party's previous anxieties about Forefathers as theatre. Because of the undesirable audience reaction - the loudest cheers being reserved for the anti-imperialist passages in the play - the authorities decided to curtail performances after several weeks. The closure of the play on 30 January 1968, officially due to the illness of its central actor, Gustaw Holoubek, resulted in a march by students of Warsaw University, protesting against what was widely seen as Soviet interference. Members of the Warsaw branch of the Writers' Union supported the protest, drafting a motion criticizing the authorities' decision. The First Secretary, Wladyslaw Gomulka, termed Forefathers' Eve "a knife in the back". The subsequent Party repression of writers, students and lecturers - in effect, a cultural "clearance" of the intelligentsia, with some choosing to emigrate - came to be known as the "March events".

Performances of Forefathers Eve under the Communist regime were therefore often indicators of the political temperature in Polish society as a whole. If, as the critic Maria Janion maintains, the Romantic-Symbolic tradition in Polish literature gave rise to Solidarity (which embodied the "religious and moral character" of which Mickiewicz wrote) and thus ultimately to the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe, Mickiewicz's dramatic cycle can be said to have played a key role in that outcome.

Further Reading

Fik, Marta, Marcowa kultura, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Wodnika, 1995

Inglot, Mieczyslaw, Polska kultura literacka Lwowa lat 1939-1941, Wroclaw: Towarzystwo Przyjaciol Polonistyki Wroclawskiej, 1995

Kopczynski, Kzrysztof, Mickiewicz i jego czytelnicy, Warsaw: Semper, 1994

(ed.) Prussak, Maria, Swiat pod kontrola, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo KRAG, 1994

Timoszewicz, Jerzy, Dziady w inscenizacji Leona Schillera, Warsaw: PIW, 1970

Weintraub, Wiktor, The Poetry of Adam Mickiewicz, The Hague: Mouton, 1955

See also