It is not easy to come close to the young Mickiewicz. He became too important to Poland. Even his friends from the Filomats wrote about him with an undifferentiated awe, as if he were a Romantic icon: a one-dimensional figure of passionate emotions and immaculate patriotism, a profile with wind-blown locks and burning eyes brooding among crags and eagles. Only much later in life, in the long years of his exile in Paris, does a human being emerge from contemporary descriptions. This middle-aged Mickiewicz, thickset and with bushy grey hair, was solemn in speech, endlessly patient with friends and strangers, short-tempered with his own family. Disappointments and a difficult marriage had marked him. His last great work, the narrative poem Pan Tadeusz, had been finished in 1834, and for the last twenty years of his life he wrote little of lasting value. Instead he gave his energies to organising the vain struggle for Polish independence, travelling up and down Europe to summon up support for the cause and to raise armies from Polish communities in exile. In Paris he fell victim to the religious charlatan Towianski, who for many years exploited the poet's fame to bolster his worthless mystical sect and drove a wedge between Mickiewicz and the political leadership of the Polish emigration.
It is hard, too, to comprehend the nature of his Polishness. Adam Mickiewicz was born in Lithuania, in the town of Nowogrodek which is now in Belarus (Byelorussia). He opened Pan Tadeusz, the most beloved work in the Polish language, with the words: 'Lithuania, my fatherland . . . ' The national poet of Poland, sent into exile at the age of twenty-four, never visited the country we now know as Poland at all, apart from a brief foray into Prussian occupied Poland near Poznan during the insurrection of 1830-1. He never saw either Warsaw or Krak6w, the two capital cities of historic Poland. It is as if Shakespeare had never visited England. A little more accurately, it is as if Shakespeare had been an Anglo-Irishman brought up in Dublin, driven to take refuge in Paris before he could find his way to London.
These ironies did not seem ironic to Adam Mickiewicz. They derived from the nature of the archaic, pre-ethnic Polish imperium which had collapsed just before he was born. The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had been united into a royal 'commonwealth' in the Middle Ages. And this 'Lithuania' was not the small Baltic-speaking nation of today, but a huge, decentralised sprawl of territories reaching southwards almost to the Black Sea - and at times touching its coast. Its peoples included not only Baits in the far north, but Slav-speaking nationalities who were later named Byelorussians and Ukrainians. Among the inhabitants of the Grand Duchy were Cossacks, Nogay Tatars and
— in the towns and villages - the main Jewish population of the world at that time.
As generations passed, the dominant culture of the Grand Duchy became Polish. Below the level of the gentry, the lower orders
- including peasantries which had often been reduced to serfdom -preserved their own languages and their own rich folk cultures. But by the time that Adam Mickiewicz went to university, Vilnius was a Polish- and Yiddish-speaking metropolis, while almost the entire landowning class - the princely families, the squirearchy, the 'bonnet lairds' of the petty aristocracy - considered themselves to be 'Lithuanian Poles'.
This was a tenacious identity. It produced many of Poland's best writers in the century-and-a-half after Mickiewicz, and the contemporary poet Czesfaw Milosz, raised in Vilnius, can still describe himself as a 'Lithuanian of Polish speech'. It gave Poland a series of national leaders and patriotic conspirators, like Jozef Piisudski who led the nation to its regained independence in 1918. Especially after the Partitions, its political tradition was fiercely anti-Russian, and its Catholic faith — in a countryside where the peasant majority was often Orthodox or Uniate - was embattled and mystical.
In the Literary Museum at Odessa, in a cabinet which once belonged to a Polish family in the 1820s, there is a miniature portrait of a woman. She is blonde, blue-eyed, conventionally pretty, with flowers in her hair and a low-cut 'peasant' dress. The women who sit on chairs keeping an eye on the visitors say that this is a picture of (Carolina Sobanska, the lover of Mickiewicz.
If it is a portrait, it is not a likeness. She was anything but a little shepherdess. Another Pole who fell for her in Odessa wrote much later, after he had decided to loathe her: 'She was about 40 [a slander: in fact she was about 30], coarse-featured, but what physical appeal, what a voice, what a manner!' Other, more believable portraits, some of which vanished during the German occupation of Poland in the Second World War, showed bronze-coloured hair, dark eyes full of amusement, a slightly snub nose with big nostrils. The younger, more cheerful part of 'good society' in Odessa adored Sobanska, and crowded to her receptions and tea-parties. Older and more respectable people, including the Vorontsovs, detested her. This was partly because she was promiscuous even by Romantic standards. But for some of the Polish families in Odessa, there was another reason. They thought her a traitor.
Karolina Rozalia z Rzewuskich Hieronimowa Sobanska, to give her full married name, was not just an aristocrat. She came from the Rzewuski family, one of the oldest and most influential clans in Poland. Her own branch of the family was firmly located in what we would now call Ukraine; her father had been a member of parliament in independent Poland and then, after the Third Partition, a Russian senator and Marshal of the Nobility in the province of Kiev. Karolina, one of a clutch of brilliantly clever and attractive sisters and brothers, was educated in Vienna. Her sister Ewa was to marry Balzac in 1850, after besieging him by letter for many years. Her brother Henryk Rzewuski, in Odessa a good-natured chatterbox with vaguely revolutionary ideas about the fate of Poland, later became ultra-conservative and even pro-Russian in his views and took to writing historical novels. (One, The Recollections of Seweryn Soplica Esquire, is still worth reading as an ironic portrait of the eastern Polish nobility.)
But Karolina lived with the chief of the Russian secret police. She had been married, almost a schoolgirl, to Hieronym Sobanski, a rich landowner who had set up an export business at Odessa for wheat from his own estates up-country. Then, in 1819, she met a much more interesting man.
Colonel-General Jan Witt was in his forties when (Carolina became his mistress. His mother was a famously beautiful Greek woman who had been 'acquired' in Istanbul as a possible mistress for Stanislaw August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland. His father was a Dutchman who managed to abduct her on the way to Warsaw. Jan Witt himself was small, shrewd, with Greek good looks; even those who hated his profession found it hard to dislike a man who was such good company. That popularity was the centre of his operation. By acquiring Karolina, and by making their house a place to which any restless young person or visitor would gravitate in search of a party and perhaps a woman, he became irresistible. It was before the age of microphones. It was still an age in which a fine fellow was a fine fellow, and his politics came second. So it came about that when the conspirators of Odessa felt like a good time - an intellectual argument, a drink, a dance - they would go round to the house of the tsar's chief of police.
Witt's assignment in Odessa was what we would now call counterintelligence. He had to build up and maintain a net of informers, and to gather intelligence about conspiracies. As far as he knew in 1825, there were two lines of enquiry to be followed up in Odessa. One was the jumble of Polish secret organisations, some more imaginary than real, which were planning an insurrection and the restoration of Poland's independence. The other was the evidence, already solid, of a Russian conspiracy against Tsar Alexander I, a plot among intellectuals and young officers to overthrow the régime and instal liberal and constitutional government. Witt knew the names of some of these conspirators, now remembered as the 'Decembrists'. He suspected - and he was on the right track for much of 1825 — that they would initiate their revolution by assassinating the tsar.
Vorontsov, perhaps having learned something from his attempt to be fatherly with Pushkin, passed Adam Mickiewicz and his two companions to the care of Witt. Mickiewicz and Jezowski were lodged in the Lycé
e Richelieu, on the first floor of the long, two-storey school building which still stands in Deribasovskaya; they were supposed to teach, but in practice were never invited to enter a classroom. Instead, they set about amusing themselves.
This is an uncomfortable period for the poet's more pious biographers. The saintly patriot is held to have let himself down. Mickiewicz, though not a virgin, had led a fairly repressed life until then. He had fallen chastely and deeply in love with the young daughter of a landowner near Nowogrddek. When he had been posted to Kaunas (Kowno) as a teacher after his graduation, he had become involved in an earthier way with Madame Kowalska, the local pharmacist's wife. But in Odessa, where northern conventions counted for little and most people lived for the moment, he let himself go. In poems and letters, he wrote about 'Danaids', the girls who took him to bed just to score a poet or to see how much money he had, and he described himself - a bit self-consciously - as a 'pasha' with a harem. But among the Danaids, there were four Polish women in Odessa who mattered more. One was a young married woman known only through a group of erotic poems as 'D.D.', with whom Mickiewicz for a time thought he might be in love. The second was Eugenia Szemiotowa, a married women with a family, whose small house was used for meetings of Polish exiles. Eugenia had nothing to do with Odessa social life, and her importance for Mickiewicz seems to have been her unwavering Catholic patriotism. Another close friend, steady and supportive, was Joanna Zaleska who, with her husband, kept the poet fed and comforted when playing the pasha grew too much for him. The fourth woman was Karolina Sobanska.
A great many letters which might have answered questions about how the poet and the policeman's mistress came together have been burned - many by Mickiewicz's son after his father's death. This lack leaves behind two mysteries. The first is what they felt for one another. The second mystery is how much they really knew about one another's secret activities, for, with both of them, there was a great deal to be known.
This was not a grand love. It began, evidently, with physical attraction and mutual curiosity, and quite possibly with a suggestion from Jan Witt. He used Karolina, before and after Adam Mickiewicz, to find out what men were up to, and if that meant going to bed with them, he accepted it. But the affair between Sobanska and Mickiewicz led to something which in the circumstances was unlikely: they became friends. Mickiewicz found in this grand and wicked young lady somebody he could talk to without making allowances; his nickname for her was 'Donna Giovanna', the bold adventuress who was more Byron's Don Juan than Mozart's. She, in turn, was touched by his awful provincial manners, which seemed to put her in her place as just one more
Vilnius student comrade. When she was an old lady, the thing she remembered best about Adam was how boorish he became when he was fully launched into a speech in her drawing-room. He would stick out his empty tea-cup at Witt, as if he were a passing lackey; and when they first met and she enquired what he would like to drink, he really did talk to her as if she were a waitress: I want coffee, but it's got to be with double cream and a thick head on it!'
Others found the relationship horrifying on moral but above all on political grounds. For them, Karolina was a Russian informer and collaborator, no more. But Mickiewicz, then and afterwards, insisted that she was a good human being finding her own way through impossible difficulties. There were things about her which he resented; she was unfaithful to him, and he could not accept it when she tried to explain that he must always be 'one among others'. She could be a nuisance, pestering him to write her into poems or badgering him - probably at Witt's request - to show her his work journals. But, unlike everyone else, he never said that she was corrupt. Many years later, when he was in Paris, the American writer Margaret Fuller met Karolina on a ship and wrote to ask Mickiewicz who she was. He told her about the jealousy (i was too romantic and too exclusive'), and expressed hope that he would meet Karolina one day in Paris; he would give her some good advice and consolation 'if she is still as she used to be: kind and sensitive'.
These were odd words to use, but his view of their relationship was that he had done most of the taking. As a writer he took her life and unpicked it in his imagination. The theme of outer treachery concealing inner loyalty, of the betrayer who is really working in the enemy camp for the cause of those who think he or she has betrayed them, fascinated him and stayed with him. It inspired the narrative poem Konrad Wallenrod, which he composed soon after leaving Odessa, a mediaeval story about a Lithuanian double agent who joins the Teutonic Knights in order to destroy them. From this work the term 'Wallenrodism' arrived in the Polish language, to describe the sinister ambiguities and double-bottomed loyalties which most Poles know about from experience. But this theme also gave him the litde-known play The Confederates of Bar, a melodrama about an episode in eighteenth-century Polish history. Mickiewicz, by then an exile, wrote it in French to pay his family's bills; the Paris theatres turned it down and lost most of the manuscript, so that only two out of five acts survive. What remains turns out to be a thinly disguised account of Witt, Karolina Sobanska and some of the ominous police agents in Witt's pay. Here Karolina is plainly a 'Wallenrod'. As a Polish countess who is the mistress of the Russian general in Krakow, she is hated and despised by most other Poles, including her own family. But in reality the countess is working to save her fellow-countrymen from arrest, exile to Siberia and the gallows.
It looks as if this was the way that Karolina explained herself to Mickiewicz. It also looks as if he believed her. About now, he wrote The Hawk', a sonnet which is either unfinished or has lost its last line to some pair of scissors. It is about a bird of prey which has taken refuge from the storm by clinging to the yard of a ship; 'let no godless hand seize him ...' Then the sonnet goes on:
He is a guest, Giovanna; whoever seizes a guest,
If he's at sea, let him beware the tempest.
Remember my own, remember your own story!
You too on life's sea - you saw monsters,
And the gale drove me astray; the rain drenched my wings.
Why these sweet words, why these deceitful hopes?
Yourself in peril, you're a snare to others ...
But Karolina Sobanska, although she may have been a bird of prey, was not the loyal countess of The Confederates. She was no Wallenrod, either. Sobanska was a skilled and devoted agent of the tsar, who did untold damage to her own country in the next few years.
In 1830, the Poles rose once again against foreign occupation. The November Insurrection began in Warsaw and spread throughout Russian-occupied Poland and Lithuania in the following year, a desperate struggle fought in pitched battles against Russian regular armies and by partisan campaigns in the forests. As the rising began to fall apart in defeat, Witt was transferred to Warsaw in 1831 as military governor of the reconquered city, and he took Karolina with him. There she is said to have saved many captured Polish officers from deportation to Siberia, and to have visited the Polish wounded in hospital. But her main task was espionage. Witt sent her to Dresden, in Saxony, to infiltrate the leadership of the insurrection and the mass of Polish refugees who had gathered there. In Dresden she posed once more as a patriot and sympathiser, and she won the confidence of at least some of the refugee community. She not only reported political and military intelligence to Witt, but, if she thought it safe, tried to persuade demoralised Polish officers to make their peace with the tsar.
Curiously, and in spite of her reputation from Odessa, the Polish insurgents were more inclined to trust her than Witt's Russian masters. Tsar Nicholas I, who had succeeded Alexander in late 1825, remained intensely suspicious of her. When Witt took her to Warsaw, the tsar wrote to Paskevich, die Russian commander-in-chief, that Sobariska should not be allowed to stay in the city and that Witt's career would be blighted if he made the mistake of marrying her. 'She is the greatest and most dexterous of schemers, and a Pole to boot, who can use her blandishments and cunning to entrap anyone in her net... ' In another letter, Nicholas crudely described
her as 'this piece of skirt who is about as faithful to Russia as she is to Witt',
Sobariska was ordered to leave Warsaw at the end of the year. Outraged, she wrote a long letter in French to Benckendorff, the supreme commander of the tsar's political police. This letter remained hidden in the secret files for more than a century until it was published in the Soviet Union in 1935» in a series of unedited and largely unknown documents concerned with Alexander Pushkin and his milieu. For the Polish literary world, it came as a horrible and humiliating shock.
My General, [she wrote] the prince marshal has just delivered to me the order given by His Majesty the Emperor about my departure from Warsaw; I submit to it with total resignation, as I would to the decree of Providence itself.
But may I be permitted, my General, to open my heart to you on this occasion and to tell you how overwhelmed by pain I feel, less by the decree which it has pleased His Majesty to issue against me than by the fearful idea that my principles, my character and my love for my master have been so cruelly judged and so unworthily distorted. I appeal to you yourself, my General, to you to whom I have spoken so openly, to whom I have written so frankly before and during the horrors which have disturbed this country. Only deign to cast your eyes over the past, which should already furnish enough to justify me! I dare to assert that there was never a woman who could display more devotion, more zeal, more activity in the service of her Sovereign than I have, often at the risk of my own destruction . . .
The opinions which my family has always professed, the dangers which my mother incurred during the insurrection in the Kiev province, the conduct of my brothers, the bond which has united me for thirteen years with a man whose dearest interests were concentrated upon those of his Sovereign, the profound contempt which I feel for the nation to which I have the misfortune to belong; all, I dare to believe, should have set me above the suspicions of which I have now become the victim.
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