They took off — we stayed by our cannons, doing nothing, and even thinking nothing. The artillery recently so busy and noisy, now seemed to be petrified. Our souls flew far and rested on the tips of the lances. Now the Muscovites are close! Already the Muscovite ranks are deploying, in order to receive them. The gunners climbed on the gun carriages, on the ammunition carts and stare into space, looking ahead with gaping mouths; it was so quiet that you could hear the flight of a fly. Each of us felt, that on this clash hung our fate, the fate of our army, perhaps even our homeland! It was a moment of expectation and terrible uncertainty, luckily lasting only a few minutes. Our cavalry clashed with the Muscovites on the high ground, both lines clashed with each other and mixed.
In the whole of this mass it boiled and the whole mass disappeared, like a dust cloud driven by the wind.
I don’t know who, but someone among us shouted at the top of his lungs — that shout broke the deathly silence, because he proclaimed victory, however nobody accompanied him. Because we, young soldiers, still we weren’t understanding, nor guessing the outcome of this battle, but besides that we feared to yield to premature joy. “Wait!” someone or other said— “as yet there’s nothing certain; nothing to be seen, everyone seems to have disappeared!”
Finally, the part of the mass that we could see, as it vanished from our sight, started to come towards us. By their colours we recognised our lancers and by the war cry: Poland Is Not Yet Lost.4
Now there’s no doubt, victory is ours! The approaching mass presented a peculiar spectacle. In it you could see a lot of foot soldiers with diverse weapons, in addition wagons, ammunition carts, artillery pieces… There were Muscovite prisoners, captured with the artillery and the whole encampment.
I wouldn’t be able to describe our joy, this frantic joy! How can it be! their whole artillery! this mighty artillery in our hands. We rushed headlong upon these cans, pressing them, caressing them, and I myself for a moment forgot about my love, the eight-pounder.
Beautiful they were, these Russian cannons, so huge, new, well mounted and stocked with everything.
“Look, sergeant” the gunner Mateusz called out “look at what red, shining cannons these cursed Muscovites5 have!”
I started with a delicate hand to stroke the polished bronze surface, and everyone repeated in chorus: “Oh, but how these muscovite cans do shine!” “and what a calibre” noticed one gunner, “that’s the calibre for me!” “that’s no peashooter!”
I started measuring the muzzle of the cannon, and the soldiers repeated: “those jaws are no joke!”
Then, when we started examining the harness, then again they called as a choir: “Oh, what sturdy straps those cursed Muscovites have!”
Nobody will guess in the end, what caused us the greatest joy; it was none other than ordinary oats, taken as spoils. Our cavalry didn’t have any more fodder, but the Muscovites had it in ample amounts; their wagons, caissons, gun carriages even, were full of oats. Soldiers rushed on them hungrily, filling sacks with them, cartridge cases, pockets, and saying that they had never seen such beautiful oats.
The leader rode up and at the sight of him a shout of enthusiasm and worship thundered. Perhaps he was very tired, because despite a cool day, sweat flowed from him in drops.
We surrounded him in a dense crowd. Amid the general commotion and bursts of joy, he alone was calm and silent, though visibly moved.
“My children,” he said to us, “I promised to lead you to the enemy; you promised to beat him — and so both you and I have kept our words.”
Such was our memorable day at Stoczek. With night falling stories began by the camp’s bonfires, there were no listeners, because everyone spoke; everyone bravely acquitted themselves in battle, everyone had jokes — because everyone was happy.
If that blessed hour comes to me, that I can again fight for my country, to see the Muscovite army in panic, to seek out my beloved eight pounder and to hurl cannon balls from it at golden roofs of the Tsarist capital city, then I will call myself happy; but even then I wouldn’t be able to feel that, which I experienced in the first battle, in the memorable Battle of Stoczek.
ENDNOTES.
1 1831.
2 A soldier of the Cracovian cavalary. “Krakus” is an alternative name of Krak, the legendary founder of Cracow, and is used to refer to an inhabitant of the city.
3 A type of tunic, of Turkish influence, typical of Cracow.
4 The first line of “Dąbrowski’s Mazurka”, now the National Anthem of Poland.
5 Untranslatable: Mateusz here uses the non-human form, echoing his earlier use of “beasts”
The Biography
Mickiewicz by Walenty Wańkowicz, 1828
ADAM MICKIEWICZ: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH by Edna Worthley Underwood
The last of the eighteenth century was an important period for Russia and Poland, not only politically, but in letters and art. It marked the birth of statesmen, patriots, poets and writers. It was into a Poland of great names and greater activities that Adam Mickiewicz was born in 1798, as son of an impoverished family of the old nobility. Three years before, the third and last partition of his native land had taken place, and the signed documents had been hastened to Petersburg to make more triumphant the birthday of the Great Catherine.
Just a few years before this (1792), Kosciusko had courageously led his forty-five thousand valiant Poles in their brave defiance of an overwhelming number of Cossacks and Russians. History had recorded the bloody Turkish wars, the Pugatshev rebellion, the uprising of the Zaporogian Cossacks and the Polish confederations. And with the nineteenth century came the Napoleonic wars with the dramatic entry of Napoleon into Russia, and a new and different mental life began to dawn over Europe.
Mickiewicz was born in Novogrodek in Lithuania. This [VIII] was the birthplace of Count Henry Rzewuski, who wrote the delightful memories of the Polish eighteenth century, under the title of “The Memories of Pan Severin Soplica,”[*] and who declared he considered it an honor to be born a “schlazig” (noble) of Lithuania, and of Novogrodek. He went to a government school in Minsk, and later attended the University of Vilna, which city in his day was a place of Jesuit faith, gloomy convents and echoing bells. All about him epoch-making events for Slav lands were taking place. It was a resounding, inspired age for his race, and he grew up to take a fitting place in that age and to be called “the immortal hero of Polish poetry.” Poland just then was the battle-ground not only for the armies of Europe, but for the diplomats. It was a place for statesmen to win their spurs. If accredited to Petersburg or Warsaw, and successful, they were believed to be equal to any diplomatic emergency. Eloquence, inspiration, and patriotic fervor must have cradled his childhood.
[*] The full title of the book is: Memories of Pan Severin Soplica, Cupbearer of Parnau, by Count Henry Rzewuski.
At the time of the birth of Mickiewicz, Russia was bringing to a close a prodigious period of development in almost every field of human activity. It was really the [IX] birth-throe of a nation that was to move powerfully, and to dominate — partially — the new age. And the splendid and never again to be equalled pageant of the life of Catherine the Great, with its wild dreams of world dominance and of the glorious revival of perished Greece, had just been unrolled for the amazement of Europe. What dramatic and enchanting memories the names of her followers call up: the Orlows, Potemkin, Panin, Poniatowski, Bestushew-Rjumin, Princess Daschkov, Razumowski.
In France, too, the same preceding period had been brilliant. It had been the France of Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, and a most resplendent and luxurious monarch. England had known her greatest orators and prime ministers. It had been the Prussia of Frederick the Great; the Dresden of August the Strong; the Austria of Joseph the Second.
A little later — during Mickiewicz’ own youth — Goethe was at the height of his power and the intellectual dictator of Europe. Under his direction and encouragement the treasures of oriental literature were being translate
d and made known to the West. This is merely a hasty glimpse of the “mise-en-scene” that preceded the debut in life of the most renowned of Polish poets. The old traditions of absolute and God-created monarchs and princely times were [X] coming to an end, and that democratic modern world, where everything was to change, was close at hand, just over the crest, indeed, of this new century into which Fate was ushering him. He was to see the last of blind power and royal prerogative, and the first dawn of a modern spirit which in time would sweep away forever, the old. It was an uncertain, difficult transition period, without standards and without measurements.
As we take a fleeting, bird’s-eye view of the stirring times in which his days were spent, his travels, his army life, his periods of professorship, we can not help but wonder at the amount of writing Mickiewicz did. And his life was not a long one; it did not reach to sixty years. But during the working years allotted him, before a mystical melancholy — which was threatening to degenerate into madness — had impaired his faculties, his mind was unusually brilliant, creative and marvelously disciplined. It obeyed at will. At one time he was professor of Latin in Lausanne; at another time he held the chair of Slavic languages in Paris. He taught Polish and Latin in Kovno. He traveled extensively in Italy in the interest of the Polish revolution. His mind was many-sided and capable of various activities. He devoted considerable time to advanced [XI] mathematics and philosophy. He made scientific investigations in Vilna under Lalewel. At one time and another he lived in various large cities of Europe. In Germany he met and became friendly with Goethe. In Switzerland he met Krasinski. In 1833 he married Celina Szymanovska. Her mother was the famous Slav beauty and musician who had so delighted Goethe in her youth.
Among writers of Russia and Poland whose life period somewhat coincided with that of Mickiewicz’ are: Korzenowski (born in 1797), the novelist (a brother of Adam Mickiewicz was fellow-teacher with Korzenowski at Charkov); Danilewski (1829), likewise a novelist — it was he who translated The Crimean Sonnets into Russian; Malzweski, Polish patriot and poet, whose “Maria” — perhaps the most popular poetic story in Poland — appeared at almost the same time as The Crimean Sonnets; Zaleski (1802), Slowacki (1809), Krasinski (1812), the three greatest poets of Poland excepting only Mickiewicz himself, the Polish critic, Brodzinski.
In Russia, the golden age of literature almost covered the same period as Mickiewicz’ own life — Puschkin, Lermontov, Schukowski, Gogol, to mention only some of the most important names.
[XII] In the eighteen-thirties we find Mickiewicz in Paris, which happened to be filled just then with a crowd of brilliant Slavic exiles. Here he became the friend of Chopin, and one of Chopin’s most talented pupils — a young Polish girl — made the first translation of the Sonnets into French. It was a wonderful and brilliant Paris which Mickiewicz entered. This was the time when the city was first called “the stepmother of Genius.” Heine was here in exile, and Börne. It knew the personal fascination and the denunciative writings of Ferdinand la Salle. It was the day, too, of Eugene Sue, Berlioz, George Sand, de Musset, Dumas, Gautier, the Goncourt Brothers, Gavarni, Sainte Beuve, Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Ary Scheffer, Delacroiz, Horace Vernet — to mention only a few great names at random. Julius Slowacki, Count Krasinski and Adam Mickiewicz were all here editing their poetry in the midst of this brilliant life in the inspiring city by the Seine. This period in Paris signs perhaps the high-water mark of the creative genius of Mickiewicz. He had already written the Ballads and Romances, the third part of Dziady, Pan Tadeuz.
The Crimean Sequence belongs to the period of Mickiewicz’ youth, the Vilna period. He joined a society at this [XIII] time which was looked upon with disfavor by the Government. At length, because of his continued participation in it, he was exiled to southern Russia. On that trip, while he was going toward Odessa, he began the Crimean Sonnets. Their success was quick and astonishing. They were translated into every language of Europe. Although the form is the traditional and classic sonnet form, he makes use of it in a slightly different manner, not altogether as an exposition of the sentiments of the soul, and the convictions and emotions of the mind, but as an instrument with which to sketch what he saw upon this eventful journey. He used the sonnet form at that period just as Verhaeren used it in “Les Flamandes,” to show us Flanders, and as Albert Samain in “Le Chariot d’Or,” to picture the gardens of Versailles. This is worthy of note. And this we must remember was before 1826. In the poetical works of Mickiewicz there was always traceable an inclination to break tradition and to search for new and untried possibilities.
On this exile in Russia he learned to know Puschkin, then a young man like himself. Puschkin has written a verse letter to him which we transcribe in free prose. “He lived among us for a while — a people strange to him. And [XIV] yet his mind cherished no hatred and no longing for revenge. Generous, kind of heart, noble-minded, he joined our evening circles, and we loved him. We exchanged our dreams, our plans — our poems. God gave him genius and inspiration. He stood always on the heights and looked down on life. We talked of history and of nations. He declared a time would come when races would forget all evil things — like war, rebellion — and dwell together peaceably in one great family. We listened to him eagerly for he had the gift of speech. After a while he went away and we gave our blessing to him. Then we learned our guest — spurred on by his revengeful race — had become our enemy. To please that bitter race of his he filled his songs with hatred. Of our beloved friend there came to us only revenge and angry thoughts. God grant that peace may come again to his embittered heart!”
Puschkin himself wrote eloquently of these same Crimean scenes that Mickiewicz shows us. He, too, was inspired by the old capital city of the Tartar rulers. We recall his “Fountain of Baktschi Serai.” And he, too, brings before our eyes again that gigantic mountain world of southern Russia in “The Prisoner of the Caucasus.”
The fame of The Crimean Sonnets was so great that [XV] Mickiewicz was offered a government position which attached him to the person of the powerful Prince Galitzin, in Moscow. It was in Rome, and singularly enough it was when he wrote the “Ode to Youth” that he began to devote himself to mystical studies which had such an injurious effect upon his mind. For some time after he had lost his fluent power as a poet, he retained his conversational gifts which were remarkable and brought him almost as much fame as his poetry. His life ended in a period as dramatic as that in which it began. He entered the Turkish wars in 1855 and died in Stamboul in that same year. It is somewhat peculiar and at the same time no little to his credit that he should have chosen the sonnet as the instrument of his quick sketching of Crimea on the trip of exile, because the sonnet has never been a frequently chosen means of expression of the Slav races, despite the numerous sonnets written later by Vrchlicky, Preseren and others. The sonnet has belonged more to the Latin races, and to the English race. The Crimean Sonnets, however, rank among the famous sequences.
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Series Contents
Series One
Anton Chekhov
Charles Dickens
D.H. Lawrence
Dickensiana Volume I
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth Gaskell
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
George
Eliot
H. G. Wells
Henry James
Ivan Turgenev
Jack London
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Joseph Conrad
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Mark Twain
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Robert Louis Stevenson
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Sir Walter Scott
The Brontës
Thomas Hardy
Virginia Woolf
Wilkie Collins
William Makepeace Thackeray
Series Two
Alexander Pushkin
Alexandre Dumas (English)
Andrew Lang
Anthony Trollope
Bram Stoker
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
Edith Wharton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
G. K. Chesterton
Gustave Flaubert (English)
H. Rider Haggard
Herman Melville
Honoré de Balzac (English)
J. W. von Goethe (English)
Jules Verne
L. Frank Baum
Lewis Carroll
Marcel Proust (English)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nikolai Gogol
O. Henry
Rudyard Kipling
Adam Mickiewicz Collected Poetical Works Page 74