But the fact remains that it was in the heart
of the Russia of Nicholas I that the Anonymous Poet
of Poland began to work out his conviction that love
and purity of soul only can save an oppressed nation,
and that her revenge can but bring about her own de-
struction.
of the Russia of Nicholas I that the Anonymous Poet
of Poland began to work out his conviction that love
and purity of soul only can save an oppressed nation,
and that her revenge can but bring about her own de-
struction.
Poland - 1919 - Krasinski - Anonymous Poet of Poland
"I have despaired of happi-
ness. " Summarizing in a few words the ideals of
greatness he had learnt in suffering and his loss of love
and glory, he tells Gaszynski who, in the past, had
been his literary sponsor:
I have written a great many things this year, all stamped
with fever and despair ; but now the time is coming to betake
myself to the poetry of deeds. . . I have not sufficient strength
of soul to become a Cooper spy; but I will be what God created
me, a good Pole, always and everywhere.
"I am half blind, I scarcely see my letters " : but he
scrawls a few more words of deep thankfulness that
Gaszynski still loved him and had not misjudged him1.
A few days later he wrote with the same difficulty,
repeating to Gaszynski what was now his faxed idea.
Do not be so carried away by hope in happiness and faith
in success. A great work is never accomplished in a short time.
Thousands of sufferings are needed to save a nation. . . There is
nothing good, nothing noble in this world without long pain,
without long toils.
"Konstanty, write often to me," he adds in a transport of pain,
hinting at what he would not say openly of the meeting be-
tween him and his father, and his future position in his country.
"Oh! if you knew what I have suffered, what I suffer, what is
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
March 17, 1832.
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? 78 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
the fate that is awaiting me, what weariness, what difficulties;
but I trust in God that the day will come when you will know
that my love for Poland did not end in words1. "
His mournful anticipations preyed upon his mind
and body with such injury to his eyesight that the doc-
tors cut him off from his two chief solaces, reading and
writing.
"You are happy," he tells Gaszynski in his letter of April 2nd,
"to have escaped the sight to which I must hasten back ;. . . you
will not gaze on the tears and execrations of the vanquished.
To one used to live a European life it will be terrible to return
again. . . to dissimulation, to the concealment of one's thoughts.
"If it is possible to write anything in Poland, I will write.
I feel the source throbbing in me, and I could inundate the
hearts of my countrymen by many a wave of poetry, but
under the censure, but amidst constraints, I cannot write. The
poet must have freedom2. "
Yet the Anonymous Poet was inspired with Iridion
in Petersburg and with his first Psalms in the Warsaw
palace.
"God saved all the world by His own sufferings,"
he says a few days afterwards, returning again and
again with the reiteration of one sick at heart to the
only thought in which he could find comfort in his grief
for Poland.
We will save our country by our sufferings. It seems that
this is the eternal law, and that salvation cannot be without
suffering, without pain, without blood. And when yearning
falls on you, when sadness burdens you, when on a foreign soil
it befalls you to curse your fate and to sigh for Poland, think:
God also suffered for us! And that thought will reconcile you
with the world, not with that transient, little world which
passes away before our eyes, and each moment can sink from
beneath our feet, but that great, only world, embracing all the
order of creation, spirits, man and the Creator Himself. And
then you will feel that you are walking towards immortality,
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
March 22, 1832. 2 Ibid. April 2, 1832.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 79
that your aim is suffering and greatness on this earth, but on
the other side of the grave greatness and happiness.
But because I am preaching you a sermon, do not think
that I have reached that rest of which you speak. On the con-
trary, each day I sink deeper into rage and despair. . . I have
sought and I have not found, I have dreamed and have gained
nothing by my dreams1.
In May, with Reeve as his companion for part of
the way, Krasinski started for Poland. His father had
ordered him to present himself at Turin to Carlo Al-
berto, his cousin, at which, writes Reeve, "he is much
annoyed and I much amused. . . I shall grin on seeing
him return from an interview with the man who be-
trayed Santa Rosa and sought to hang Prandi and Co. 2"
Reeve, however, did not enjoy this spectacle, for the
interview failed to come off. In a condition near blind-
ness, Krasinski made the journey by slow stages, halting
at Venice for an unsuccessful treatment on his eyes.
He . parted with Reeve at Innsbruck. It was the
farewell of their youthful friendship3. They still corre-
sponded for a few years longer, with as great affection
as before--on Krasinski's side at all events : all Reeve's
letters from this time are missing, probably destroyed
by Krasinski for caution's sake--but with ever increas-
ing lapses into silence. They met each other again ; but
they were never more to each other what they had once
been. Propinquity had been the chief motive of their
intimacy in Krasinski's young loneliness; but the life
of Henry Reeve, the successful politician, the prosperous
man of affairs, and that of the Polish poet, working for
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
April 6, 1832.
2 J. K. Laughton, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry
Reeve.
3 "I never lived in his intimacy again" : thus Reeve, op. cit.
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? 80 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
his nation in secrecy and pain, drifted too far apart for
the affection of their youth to be able to survive1. In
all likelihood, even before they said good-bye at Inns-
bruck, the months of mental torture that Zygmunt had
endured during the Rising had already morally parted
him from the young Englishman who had known no
struggle: for Krasinski, writing from Vienna to Reeve,
prophesied that the latter would end by falling into
materialism, and complained that he had become very
English2--which we regret was not intended as a com-
pliment.
For several weeks Krasinski remained in Vienna
under the oculist. Unable to read or go out until his
evening drive, he sat the whole day in a darkened room,
a prey to all his old griefs and harrowing anticipations.
On the eve of his entry into his country where, under
the iron rule of Nicholas I, all correspondence with the
exiles of the Rising must cease, Krasinski wrote his
farewells to Gaszynski, brief by reason of his suffering
eyes, begging him in the uncertainty whether they
might ever meet again never to doubt that he was his
friend and a true Pole.
He reached Warsaw in the August of 1832. He
had left it in 1829. He returned to find the Cossacks
and Russian police in the streets where three years ago
he had seen the Polish uniforms he would never see
there again: to be reminded at each step that the
Poland he had lived in as a boy was gone from him for
ever. He went on at once to his country home, where
his father awaited him. Reading between the lines of
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski. See also Dr Kallenbach's Preface
to Correspondance de Sigismond Krasinski et de Henry Reeve.
2 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Vienna, July, 1832.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
81
a short note in English which Krasinski wrote from War-
saw to Reeve, it is apparent that he looked forward with
dread to a meeting, the pain of which must have far
outweighed any joy it could have brought him. Upon
what passed between him and his father when they saw
each other again he kept absolute silence: only telling
Reeve of his father's tears and blessing when he em-
braced him, and of the affection that had prepared every
comfort and luxury for the son who had been long
absent.
Amelia Zatuska was also at Opinog6ra. Henrietta
Willan was by now little more than a memory for Kra-
sinski, and, with the impressionability of his nature, his
love for the woman who had fascinated him as a boy
re-awoke. He hung upon her music, and wrote his
usual style of fragments in poetical prose, addressed to
her. But he was only permitted to be a few weeks at
his home. His father intended to spend the winter in
Petersburg, and insisted on his son accompanying him.
Nothing could have been so ill judged as to expose a
half blind boy, whose nerves and health were shattered,
to the rigorous winter of the Russian capital, to the long
journey by carriage over the bad roads at so late a
season, and still more to the false and intolerable posi-
tion of residence under the shadow of Nicholas I, among
those to whom the misery of Poland was a triumph.
Whether Wincenty Krasinski, who from first to last
never succeeded in understanding his son's character,
decided upon this proceeding with the ambition of
securing for Zygmunt some post in the Russian govern-
ment1; or whether, as Count Tarnowski surmises, the
1 Stanistaw Maiachowski, Short Sketch of the Life and Writings of
Zygmunt Krasinski (Polish). Being privately printed, I have been unable
G. 6
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? 82 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
General had received a mandate from the Tsar, to dis-
obey which meant Siberia1, is a matter of conjecture.
It was one step further in the road that the Anonymous
Poet trod for his father's sake.
All Krasinski's letters to Reeve from the moment
that he crossed the frontiers are worded with great cau-
tion. With his correspondence opened by the Russian
police, he could say no word of any Polish matters, of
the things that most went to his heart. In a letter to
Reeve, sent after he had started for Petersburg, he
writes, with irony pointed to deceive those through
whose hands the words might pass, both a covert warn-
ing to the Englishman to be careful what he wrote to
him2 and his own vow to be ever faithful to Poland.
If you ask me "What shall you do there? " I will answer:
/ don't know [in English]. However, you know me, and you
know that I love eating, drinking, etc. , and that nothing in this
world can make me change my opinion on that point, nothing,
nothing3.
Krasinski spent five months in Petersburg, too ill
to leave his room. He passed his time between his bed
and walking restlessly about his luxurious apartment,
hung with green and silver tapestry, which looked out
on a courtyard and a sky heavy with snowclouds. His
solitude was only broken by the visits of his father who,
says he to Reeve, was "an angel" to him, and by the
occasional calls of the few uncongenial acquaintances he
had in the city. His eyes were on fire, and the doctors
doubted whether they could save them. He was obliged
to see the original, and in this instance quote Dr Kallenbach's reference.
J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 Correspondence. Dr Kallenbach's note, Vol. II, p. io.
3 Ibid. Krasinski to Reeve. Knyszyn, Sept 22, 1832.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 83
to live with closed eyes, to dictate his letters, to employ
a secretary to read aloud. In later years he confided to
a Polish friend that these months in Petersburg were
the saddest of his life; practically blind as he was, in
acute fear of totally losing his eyesight, alone in his
singularly painful position, cut off from all to whom he
could unburden his mind1. But that dreary winter of
moral loneliness was filled for Krasinski with one ab-
sorbing occupation: thought.
"I have learned to think," he wrote to Reeve2. Ut-
terly cast upon the resources of his own soul, he not
only collected clearly his thoughts on the strife between
past and present that were to become The Undivine
Comedy, but it was during this winter that Iridion took
being. Dr Kallenbach points out the analogy between
the two great Polish poets, Adam Mickiewicz and the
Anonymous Poet, whose genius rose above the same
conditions of slavery, and who were, by those very con-
ditions, inspired to speak under a veil the words for
their nation that could not be said openly3.
"A few days ago," Krasinski told Reeve, " during the night
the idea of a poem came to me, a great idea. I leapt from
my bed, and cried: AncK io sonopittore*"
This idea was his Iridion. Three months later he
tells Reeve in a dictated letter that his Iridion Amphilo-
chides is " a Greek in Rome : et dulces moriens reminis-
citur Argos6. " More he dared not say.
That the motive of Iridion was already sufficiently
1 St. Maiachowski, op. cit. Quoted by Count Tarnowski and Dr
Kallenbach in their monographs on Krasinski.
2 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Nov. I, 1832.
3 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
4 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Oct. 22, 1832.
6 Ibid. Jan. 20, 1833.
6--2
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? 84 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
developed for the play to be begun proves what point
Krasinski had reached in the conflict between his
craving for revenge and what was to the young Pole,
watching his country's agony, the hardest word of Christ-
ianity. Three years more passed before Iridion was
finished: its creator wavered before he could attain to
his sublime conclusion at the foot of the cross in the
Coliseum.
But the fact remains that it was in the heart
of the Russia of Nicholas I that the Anonymous Poet
of Poland began to work out his conviction that love
and purity of soul only can save an oppressed nation,
and that her revenge can but bring about her own de-
struction. As a son of the conquered race in the enemy's
city, Krasinski was in moral kinship with the Greek
Iridion, gazing on the triumph of Rome. He fought
his battle out in the silence and solitude of his room,
while, as a relief from the monotonous snows of the
northern capital, his memory returned to translucent
blue Italian skies, to the roses of the Palatine, the glowing
colours of classical Rome among which walks Iridion1.
While he was thus developing in Petersburg the
problem of Iridion he also reflected on those that, touch-
ing the innermost emotions of his heart less intimately,
were, as we see from his letters to Reeve, fast ripening
for expression in The Undivine Comedy.
Reeve had made a new friend in an Englishman,
who, as the man of the future, evolved into the Pan-
kracy of The Undivine Comedy. Krasinski mistrusted
him.
Henry! every man, if he be weak, finds his Mephistopheles
like Faust. [These words show how Krasinski's conception both
of the Mephistopheles in Iridion and of Pankracy was seething
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
85
in his brain. ] It begins with enthusiasm, it finishes with disgust
or despair. There is nothing to fear from a heart we love; but
the ascendancy of a strong head is a very different thing. For
some time we struggle, then we become a slave1.
There are two parts in man: thought and action [writes
the creator of Henryk] : one as noble as the other, and dividing
life turn and turn about between them. Those who never act
are called fakirs; those who never think and always act are
called machines; those who think and work are called men.
It is obvious that in this last class there are individuals in whom
the element of thought predominates, in others that of action.
But if there is to be greatness or beauty there must always be
a proper quantity of both one and the other2.
I know better than anyone there must be a future. I un-
derstand the triumphal procession of that future. . . I know that
we will all pass to dust, having admired nothing, loved nothing
real, hated much. And, if we do love something, it is only a
world of dreams, of emptiness: the past.
When I consider the matter as a philosopher, I see only
an admirable and eternal order; but when I consider the
matter as a man who has the heart of a man, the feelings of a
man, ties on this earth, I see only disorder. . . Then, when we
have perished, let them arrange the earth in their own way, as
they like; and here I think that a day will come when love
will again prevail. For God is justice and beauty, the universe
is harmonious, and I am immortal*.
Before Krasinski left Petersburg he told Reeve that
since he had last seen him he had thought so deeply
that the work of several years seemed to have taken
place within him.
God forgive me for having reached a conclusion degrading
to humanity. It is that the masses have nothing but appetite,
and never make use of reason; that man is everything, and
that by him all things are done, and that men are nothing.
Still the man is always obliged to sacrifice himself for men,
and never to sacrifice them for him. Even though he himself
be convinced that happiness is impossible on this earth, he
ought to believe in it for others and walk with all his strength
to that chimerical end4.
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Nov. 17, 1832.
2 Ibid. Nov. 21, 1832. 3 Ibid. Jan. 6, 1833.
* Ibid. Feb. 5, 1833.
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? 86 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Though Krasinski was barely twenty-one, by now
his youth seems far behind him. He reminds Reeve of
the "fabulous time of life" when they both dreamed
and hoped, and had faith in men.
Formerly we wanted to become poetical beings; to-day we
must become moral beings, live in the bosom of reality, that is
to say, sustain each moment a struggle that burns by slow fire,
a struggle which is waged between our ideas and facts, which
produces the modification of our ideas, the concessions that
our soul, formerly absolute and superb, is forced to make to
the world of matter, action, interest, etc. etc.
He sees in that very conflict poetry ; but the poetry of
duty done in darkness, of work unrewarded save by the
sentiment of personal dignity1. This is the language of
one who is no more young. There is in these letters of
Krasinski a growing pessimism. At this time he began
the study of German philosophy that for years contri-
buted to darken his spiritual outlook. In the first letter
he was free to write to Gaszynski after he had left Russia
he told him that he still wrote: "but not with a like
faith as of old. Where are all my faiths gone2? "
One significant incident cut across the manner of
Krasinski's life in Petersburg. He was presented by
his father to Nicholas I. He stood face to face with
the man at whose hand the Polish nation suffered a fate
that has made the history of Poland the tragedy of
modern Europe; whose treatment of the vanquished
was one of such pitiless cruelty that Mickiewicz could
find no greater blasphemy to place on the lips of his
Konrad, driven mad by the tears of his people, than
the taunt that God was no father to His creatures, but
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Jan. 25, 1833.
2 Letters to Konstanty Gaszynski. Vienna, July 7, 1833.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 87
their Tsar1. Krasinski, being the son of a Pole who
had thrown in his lot with Russia, was received by the
Tsar with a graciousness that was in itself the bitterest
affront to a Polish heart, and offered a post at court or
in the diplomatic service. The danger of the moment,
when a refusal might have involved the gravest con-
sequences, was only averted by the condition of Zyg-
munt's health that won him the imperial permission to
leave Russia for a better climate.
These details of his interview with Nicholas I
Krasinski probably confided long afterwards to the friend
who has related them3. In his as yet published corre-
spondence we have no word upon the subject. But an
echo of what it had meant to him may be found, in
veiled figures, in another place--in a prose poem, called
The Temptation, that he wrote four years later for a
young compatriot who was about to be confronted with
the moral ordeal of a Pole's life in Petersburg.
He left Petersburg in March, 1833. He stopped for
a short time in Warsaw on his way to Vienna. Dictating
from there a letter to Reeve, he apologizes for a long
silence. He had had no one to write his letters for him,
and could only during his journey trust to the kindness
of any chance person who would take down his dictation.
There are ineffable delights for the artist [he proceeds with
reflections that are the key to Henryk's character in The Un-
divine Comedy] : but also he is fated to suffer more than anyone
else in this world. In truth his egoism is sublime; but it is
always egoism. And what will he do when he finds himself in
positions where, to be happy, he must forget himself? He will
1 Adam Mickiewicz, The Ancestors, Part III. See my Adam Mickie-
wicz, where I have given a translation of the scene in question.
2 Stanistaw Matachowski, Short Sketch of the Life and Writings of
Zygmunt Krasinski, quoted by Count Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski,
and by Dr Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 88 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
never know what the love of a woman really is; because, for
him, everything is himself. He loves his masterpieces ; but he
loves nothing else. That is why reality is poison to him. That
is why he can find nowhere any fulfilment of his desires, any
end to his dreams. Everything that is not himself disgusts him
and drives him to despair. . . So long as he is alone he is happy
. . . That is why a great artist is never either a good husband or
a good father. . . One pays dearly for having been admitted to
the secrets of the gods. One only drop fallen from on high on
your brow renders you incapable of living here below1.
In our dreams [writes the idealist, tormented by the eternal
quest], in those sublime conceptions which yet must often
seem ridiculous to the masses, we never feel the most simple
difficulties, our courage is ready to brave the thunderbolt of
heaven; but if we have to take but two steps, say a few words,
approach, in fact, earthly life in its daily occurrences, we sink
with fatigue. . . To dream is to be of another world, but it is not
to be ignorant or mad. There is only madness if we think we
can apply the laws of our dreams or of our synthesis to the
analysis of life down here; but everyone is obliged to fall into
that mistake in the beginning. Some stay in it, and those are
feeble, incomplete beings, but full of gentle poetry and misfor-
tunes. Others, having recognized their youth, and not under-
standing this sublime warning of Heaven, imagine that all is
finished; that the true world is wretchedness and analysis.
These are also feeble and incomplete beings, who end by the
corruption of materialism. There are few men who have
strength enough to bear difficulties and obstacles, to decide to
enter practical life by facing it--the only one that leads to
some results--and to keep at the same time an unshakable
faith in the promises that were made to them in the day of
their delirium, when they caught a glimpse of luminous
spheres that they have never since been able to attain. They
only will do something3.
Konstanty Danielewicz, the friend who had stood
by Krasinski wTTeli~n~e~was~mobbed at the University,
joined Zygmunt in Warsaw, and went on with him to
Vienna. From this time Danielewicz, until his death,
was the devoted companion of Krasinski in his wan-
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Warsaw, April 4, 1833.
2 Ibid. April 7, 1833.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
89
derings, and the one that the poet seems to have loved
best of all his friends. The misfortunes of his life were
a bond that knit Krasinski, with whom to pity was to
love, very closely to him. His philosophical intellect
strongly influenced, not altogether for the good, the
trend of Krasinski's mind during the years that they
lived together. He was a finished musician, though no
poet; and in his playing, Krasinski, who was passion-
ately fond of music, found inspiration for the struggle
of the spirits in The Undivine Comedy over Henryk's
soul1. His somewhat severe candour, and a certain want
of sympathy with Zygmunt's nervous and highly strung
temperament, never chilled their friendship, or dimin-
ished the enthusiastic admiration that Krasinski, an
idealist in his affections as elsewhere, lavished upon him.
Krasinski spent the summer in Vienna with Daniele-
wicz, undergoing medical treatment. He was in wretched
health, and the days went by for both youths in exter-
nal monotony, but, for Krasinski, in creation. He and
Danielewicz sat talking for hours of the social problems
which were at the time convulsing Europe: and it was
then that Krasinski, only able to write a few words at
a stretch in his blind condition, committed to paper The
Undivine Comedy. To antedate the words he wrote to
Gaszynski, with their foreshadowing of the promises of
Dawn, soon after The Undivine Comedy was completed:
I know that our civilization is nigh to death: I know that
the times are near when new crimes will come to punish the
old, and themselves be condemned in the sight of God--but
I know that they will create nothing, will build nothing. They
will pass like the horse of Attila, and, after them, silence. Then
1 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski. Lw6w,
1912 (Polish). See also Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Warsaw,
April 9, 1833.
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? 90
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
only, that which neither you nor anyone knows or understands
will come upon us, rise from the chaos, and build the new
world from the Divine Will, from the predestiny of the human
race; but then both your and my bones shall be somewhere
dust1.
In the October of 1833 Krasinski published under
false initials his Agay Han.
He had begun this story in Geneva. The Tartar
page, Agay Han, is in love with Maryna, the widow
of the false Demetrius. After her husband's death,
Maryna has taken refuge in a castle, where the Mus-
covite boyars capture her, and cast her into prison.
She is rescued by the page; but she gives her hand to
Zarucki, who had defended the castle before it fell.
Panting for revenge, Agay Han follows them with
Russian troops, slays the husband, and drowns both
Maryna and himself.
This, the last work of Krasinski's immaturity, lacks
interest. Begun when the author's nerves had gone to
pieces during his sufferings in Geneva2, the style of the
first part is weak and over coloured. Before the story
ends the errors of manner are pruned away, and after
the earlier chapters the rest of the work, says Dr Kal-
lenbach, shows a decided step forward in the poet's
powers3. There is, however, so great a gulf between
Agay Han and its successor--the masterpiece of
matured genius which as The Undivine Comedy will live
with the Polish language--that it is hard to realize
they were written, and with no intermediate degrees,
by the same hand.
In the autumn Krasinski wandered, still with
1 Letters to Konstanty Gaszynski. Rome, Jan. 17, 1834.
s J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
3 Op. cit.
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ness. " Summarizing in a few words the ideals of
greatness he had learnt in suffering and his loss of love
and glory, he tells Gaszynski who, in the past, had
been his literary sponsor:
I have written a great many things this year, all stamped
with fever and despair ; but now the time is coming to betake
myself to the poetry of deeds. . . I have not sufficient strength
of soul to become a Cooper spy; but I will be what God created
me, a good Pole, always and everywhere.
"I am half blind, I scarcely see my letters " : but he
scrawls a few more words of deep thankfulness that
Gaszynski still loved him and had not misjudged him1.
A few days later he wrote with the same difficulty,
repeating to Gaszynski what was now his faxed idea.
Do not be so carried away by hope in happiness and faith
in success. A great work is never accomplished in a short time.
Thousands of sufferings are needed to save a nation. . . There is
nothing good, nothing noble in this world without long pain,
without long toils.
"Konstanty, write often to me," he adds in a transport of pain,
hinting at what he would not say openly of the meeting be-
tween him and his father, and his future position in his country.
"Oh! if you knew what I have suffered, what I suffer, what is
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
March 17, 1832.
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? 78 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
the fate that is awaiting me, what weariness, what difficulties;
but I trust in God that the day will come when you will know
that my love for Poland did not end in words1. "
His mournful anticipations preyed upon his mind
and body with such injury to his eyesight that the doc-
tors cut him off from his two chief solaces, reading and
writing.
"You are happy," he tells Gaszynski in his letter of April 2nd,
"to have escaped the sight to which I must hasten back ;. . . you
will not gaze on the tears and execrations of the vanquished.
To one used to live a European life it will be terrible to return
again. . . to dissimulation, to the concealment of one's thoughts.
"If it is possible to write anything in Poland, I will write.
I feel the source throbbing in me, and I could inundate the
hearts of my countrymen by many a wave of poetry, but
under the censure, but amidst constraints, I cannot write. The
poet must have freedom2. "
Yet the Anonymous Poet was inspired with Iridion
in Petersburg and with his first Psalms in the Warsaw
palace.
"God saved all the world by His own sufferings,"
he says a few days afterwards, returning again and
again with the reiteration of one sick at heart to the
only thought in which he could find comfort in his grief
for Poland.
We will save our country by our sufferings. It seems that
this is the eternal law, and that salvation cannot be without
suffering, without pain, without blood. And when yearning
falls on you, when sadness burdens you, when on a foreign soil
it befalls you to curse your fate and to sigh for Poland, think:
God also suffered for us! And that thought will reconcile you
with the world, not with that transient, little world which
passes away before our eyes, and each moment can sink from
beneath our feet, but that great, only world, embracing all the
order of creation, spirits, man and the Creator Himself. And
then you will feel that you are walking towards immortality,
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
March 22, 1832. 2 Ibid. April 2, 1832.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 79
that your aim is suffering and greatness on this earth, but on
the other side of the grave greatness and happiness.
But because I am preaching you a sermon, do not think
that I have reached that rest of which you speak. On the con-
trary, each day I sink deeper into rage and despair. . . I have
sought and I have not found, I have dreamed and have gained
nothing by my dreams1.
In May, with Reeve as his companion for part of
the way, Krasinski started for Poland. His father had
ordered him to present himself at Turin to Carlo Al-
berto, his cousin, at which, writes Reeve, "he is much
annoyed and I much amused. . . I shall grin on seeing
him return from an interview with the man who be-
trayed Santa Rosa and sought to hang Prandi and Co. 2"
Reeve, however, did not enjoy this spectacle, for the
interview failed to come off. In a condition near blind-
ness, Krasinski made the journey by slow stages, halting
at Venice for an unsuccessful treatment on his eyes.
He . parted with Reeve at Innsbruck. It was the
farewell of their youthful friendship3. They still corre-
sponded for a few years longer, with as great affection
as before--on Krasinski's side at all events : all Reeve's
letters from this time are missing, probably destroyed
by Krasinski for caution's sake--but with ever increas-
ing lapses into silence. They met each other again ; but
they were never more to each other what they had once
been. Propinquity had been the chief motive of their
intimacy in Krasinski's young loneliness; but the life
of Henry Reeve, the successful politician, the prosperous
man of affairs, and that of the Polish poet, working for
1 Letters of Zygmunt Krasinski to Konstanty Gaszynski. Geneva,
April 6, 1832.
2 J. K. Laughton, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry
Reeve.
3 "I never lived in his intimacy again" : thus Reeve, op. cit.
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? 80 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
his nation in secrecy and pain, drifted too far apart for
the affection of their youth to be able to survive1. In
all likelihood, even before they said good-bye at Inns-
bruck, the months of mental torture that Zygmunt had
endured during the Rising had already morally parted
him from the young Englishman who had known no
struggle: for Krasinski, writing from Vienna to Reeve,
prophesied that the latter would end by falling into
materialism, and complained that he had become very
English2--which we regret was not intended as a com-
pliment.
For several weeks Krasinski remained in Vienna
under the oculist. Unable to read or go out until his
evening drive, he sat the whole day in a darkened room,
a prey to all his old griefs and harrowing anticipations.
On the eve of his entry into his country where, under
the iron rule of Nicholas I, all correspondence with the
exiles of the Rising must cease, Krasinski wrote his
farewells to Gaszynski, brief by reason of his suffering
eyes, begging him in the uncertainty whether they
might ever meet again never to doubt that he was his
friend and a true Pole.
He reached Warsaw in the August of 1832. He
had left it in 1829. He returned to find the Cossacks
and Russian police in the streets where three years ago
he had seen the Polish uniforms he would never see
there again: to be reminded at each step that the
Poland he had lived in as a boy was gone from him for
ever. He went on at once to his country home, where
his father awaited him. Reading between the lines of
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski. See also Dr Kallenbach's Preface
to Correspondance de Sigismond Krasinski et de Henry Reeve.
2 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Vienna, July, 1832.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
81
a short note in English which Krasinski wrote from War-
saw to Reeve, it is apparent that he looked forward with
dread to a meeting, the pain of which must have far
outweighed any joy it could have brought him. Upon
what passed between him and his father when they saw
each other again he kept absolute silence: only telling
Reeve of his father's tears and blessing when he em-
braced him, and of the affection that had prepared every
comfort and luxury for the son who had been long
absent.
Amelia Zatuska was also at Opinog6ra. Henrietta
Willan was by now little more than a memory for Kra-
sinski, and, with the impressionability of his nature, his
love for the woman who had fascinated him as a boy
re-awoke. He hung upon her music, and wrote his
usual style of fragments in poetical prose, addressed to
her. But he was only permitted to be a few weeks at
his home. His father intended to spend the winter in
Petersburg, and insisted on his son accompanying him.
Nothing could have been so ill judged as to expose a
half blind boy, whose nerves and health were shattered,
to the rigorous winter of the Russian capital, to the long
journey by carriage over the bad roads at so late a
season, and still more to the false and intolerable posi-
tion of residence under the shadow of Nicholas I, among
those to whom the misery of Poland was a triumph.
Whether Wincenty Krasinski, who from first to last
never succeeded in understanding his son's character,
decided upon this proceeding with the ambition of
securing for Zygmunt some post in the Russian govern-
ment1; or whether, as Count Tarnowski surmises, the
1 Stanistaw Maiachowski, Short Sketch of the Life and Writings of
Zygmunt Krasinski (Polish). Being privately printed, I have been unable
G. 6
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? 82 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
General had received a mandate from the Tsar, to dis-
obey which meant Siberia1, is a matter of conjecture.
It was one step further in the road that the Anonymous
Poet trod for his father's sake.
All Krasinski's letters to Reeve from the moment
that he crossed the frontiers are worded with great cau-
tion. With his correspondence opened by the Russian
police, he could say no word of any Polish matters, of
the things that most went to his heart. In a letter to
Reeve, sent after he had started for Petersburg, he
writes, with irony pointed to deceive those through
whose hands the words might pass, both a covert warn-
ing to the Englishman to be careful what he wrote to
him2 and his own vow to be ever faithful to Poland.
If you ask me "What shall you do there? " I will answer:
/ don't know [in English]. However, you know me, and you
know that I love eating, drinking, etc. , and that nothing in this
world can make me change my opinion on that point, nothing,
nothing3.
Krasinski spent five months in Petersburg, too ill
to leave his room. He passed his time between his bed
and walking restlessly about his luxurious apartment,
hung with green and silver tapestry, which looked out
on a courtyard and a sky heavy with snowclouds. His
solitude was only broken by the visits of his father who,
says he to Reeve, was "an angel" to him, and by the
occasional calls of the few uncongenial acquaintances he
had in the city. His eyes were on fire, and the doctors
doubted whether they could save them. He was obliged
to see the original, and in this instance quote Dr Kallenbach's reference.
J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
1 St. Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski.
2 Correspondence. Dr Kallenbach's note, Vol. II, p. io.
3 Ibid. Krasinski to Reeve. Knyszyn, Sept 22, 1832.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 83
to live with closed eyes, to dictate his letters, to employ
a secretary to read aloud. In later years he confided to
a Polish friend that these months in Petersburg were
the saddest of his life; practically blind as he was, in
acute fear of totally losing his eyesight, alone in his
singularly painful position, cut off from all to whom he
could unburden his mind1. But that dreary winter of
moral loneliness was filled for Krasinski with one ab-
sorbing occupation: thought.
"I have learned to think," he wrote to Reeve2. Ut-
terly cast upon the resources of his own soul, he not
only collected clearly his thoughts on the strife between
past and present that were to become The Undivine
Comedy, but it was during this winter that Iridion took
being. Dr Kallenbach points out the analogy between
the two great Polish poets, Adam Mickiewicz and the
Anonymous Poet, whose genius rose above the same
conditions of slavery, and who were, by those very con-
ditions, inspired to speak under a veil the words for
their nation that could not be said openly3.
"A few days ago," Krasinski told Reeve, " during the night
the idea of a poem came to me, a great idea. I leapt from
my bed, and cried: AncK io sonopittore*"
This idea was his Iridion. Three months later he
tells Reeve in a dictated letter that his Iridion Amphilo-
chides is " a Greek in Rome : et dulces moriens reminis-
citur Argos6. " More he dared not say.
That the motive of Iridion was already sufficiently
1 St. Maiachowski, op. cit. Quoted by Count Tarnowski and Dr
Kallenbach in their monographs on Krasinski.
2 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Nov. I, 1832.
3 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
4 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Oct. 22, 1832.
6 Ibid. Jan. 20, 1833.
6--2
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? 84 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
developed for the play to be begun proves what point
Krasinski had reached in the conflict between his
craving for revenge and what was to the young Pole,
watching his country's agony, the hardest word of Christ-
ianity. Three years more passed before Iridion was
finished: its creator wavered before he could attain to
his sublime conclusion at the foot of the cross in the
Coliseum.
But the fact remains that it was in the heart
of the Russia of Nicholas I that the Anonymous Poet
of Poland began to work out his conviction that love
and purity of soul only can save an oppressed nation,
and that her revenge can but bring about her own de-
struction. As a son of the conquered race in the enemy's
city, Krasinski was in moral kinship with the Greek
Iridion, gazing on the triumph of Rome. He fought
his battle out in the silence and solitude of his room,
while, as a relief from the monotonous snows of the
northern capital, his memory returned to translucent
blue Italian skies, to the roses of the Palatine, the glowing
colours of classical Rome among which walks Iridion1.
While he was thus developing in Petersburg the
problem of Iridion he also reflected on those that, touch-
ing the innermost emotions of his heart less intimately,
were, as we see from his letters to Reeve, fast ripening
for expression in The Undivine Comedy.
Reeve had made a new friend in an Englishman,
who, as the man of the future, evolved into the Pan-
kracy of The Undivine Comedy. Krasinski mistrusted
him.
Henry! every man, if he be weak, finds his Mephistopheles
like Faust. [These words show how Krasinski's conception both
of the Mephistopheles in Iridion and of Pankracy was seething
1 J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
85
in his brain. ] It begins with enthusiasm, it finishes with disgust
or despair. There is nothing to fear from a heart we love; but
the ascendancy of a strong head is a very different thing. For
some time we struggle, then we become a slave1.
There are two parts in man: thought and action [writes
the creator of Henryk] : one as noble as the other, and dividing
life turn and turn about between them. Those who never act
are called fakirs; those who never think and always act are
called machines; those who think and work are called men.
It is obvious that in this last class there are individuals in whom
the element of thought predominates, in others that of action.
But if there is to be greatness or beauty there must always be
a proper quantity of both one and the other2.
I know better than anyone there must be a future. I un-
derstand the triumphal procession of that future. . . I know that
we will all pass to dust, having admired nothing, loved nothing
real, hated much. And, if we do love something, it is only a
world of dreams, of emptiness: the past.
When I consider the matter as a philosopher, I see only
an admirable and eternal order; but when I consider the
matter as a man who has the heart of a man, the feelings of a
man, ties on this earth, I see only disorder. . . Then, when we
have perished, let them arrange the earth in their own way, as
they like; and here I think that a day will come when love
will again prevail. For God is justice and beauty, the universe
is harmonious, and I am immortal*.
Before Krasinski left Petersburg he told Reeve that
since he had last seen him he had thought so deeply
that the work of several years seemed to have taken
place within him.
God forgive me for having reached a conclusion degrading
to humanity. It is that the masses have nothing but appetite,
and never make use of reason; that man is everything, and
that by him all things are done, and that men are nothing.
Still the man is always obliged to sacrifice himself for men,
and never to sacrifice them for him. Even though he himself
be convinced that happiness is impossible on this earth, he
ought to believe in it for others and walk with all his strength
to that chimerical end4.
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Nov. 17, 1832.
2 Ibid. Nov. 21, 1832. 3 Ibid. Jan. 6, 1833.
* Ibid. Feb. 5, 1833.
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? 86 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
Though Krasinski was barely twenty-one, by now
his youth seems far behind him. He reminds Reeve of
the "fabulous time of life" when they both dreamed
and hoped, and had faith in men.
Formerly we wanted to become poetical beings; to-day we
must become moral beings, live in the bosom of reality, that is
to say, sustain each moment a struggle that burns by slow fire,
a struggle which is waged between our ideas and facts, which
produces the modification of our ideas, the concessions that
our soul, formerly absolute and superb, is forced to make to
the world of matter, action, interest, etc. etc.
He sees in that very conflict poetry ; but the poetry of
duty done in darkness, of work unrewarded save by the
sentiment of personal dignity1. This is the language of
one who is no more young. There is in these letters of
Krasinski a growing pessimism. At this time he began
the study of German philosophy that for years contri-
buted to darken his spiritual outlook. In the first letter
he was free to write to Gaszynski after he had left Russia
he told him that he still wrote: "but not with a like
faith as of old. Where are all my faiths gone2? "
One significant incident cut across the manner of
Krasinski's life in Petersburg. He was presented by
his father to Nicholas I. He stood face to face with
the man at whose hand the Polish nation suffered a fate
that has made the history of Poland the tragedy of
modern Europe; whose treatment of the vanquished
was one of such pitiless cruelty that Mickiewicz could
find no greater blasphemy to place on the lips of his
Konrad, driven mad by the tears of his people, than
the taunt that God was no father to His creatures, but
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Petersburg, Jan. 25, 1833.
2 Letters to Konstanty Gaszynski. Vienna, July 7, 1833.
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? The Sowing of the Seed 87
their Tsar1. Krasinski, being the son of a Pole who
had thrown in his lot with Russia, was received by the
Tsar with a graciousness that was in itself the bitterest
affront to a Polish heart, and offered a post at court or
in the diplomatic service. The danger of the moment,
when a refusal might have involved the gravest con-
sequences, was only averted by the condition of Zyg-
munt's health that won him the imperial permission to
leave Russia for a better climate.
These details of his interview with Nicholas I
Krasinski probably confided long afterwards to the friend
who has related them3. In his as yet published corre-
spondence we have no word upon the subject. But an
echo of what it had meant to him may be found, in
veiled figures, in another place--in a prose poem, called
The Temptation, that he wrote four years later for a
young compatriot who was about to be confronted with
the moral ordeal of a Pole's life in Petersburg.
He left Petersburg in March, 1833. He stopped for
a short time in Warsaw on his way to Vienna. Dictating
from there a letter to Reeve, he apologizes for a long
silence. He had had no one to write his letters for him,
and could only during his journey trust to the kindness
of any chance person who would take down his dictation.
There are ineffable delights for the artist [he proceeds with
reflections that are the key to Henryk's character in The Un-
divine Comedy] : but also he is fated to suffer more than anyone
else in this world. In truth his egoism is sublime; but it is
always egoism. And what will he do when he finds himself in
positions where, to be happy, he must forget himself? He will
1 Adam Mickiewicz, The Ancestors, Part III. See my Adam Mickie-
wicz, where I have given a translation of the scene in question.
2 Stanistaw Matachowski, Short Sketch of the Life and Writings of
Zygmunt Krasinski, quoted by Count Tarnowski, Zygmunt Krasinski,
and by Dr Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
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? 88 The Anonymous Poet of Poland
never know what the love of a woman really is; because, for
him, everything is himself. He loves his masterpieces ; but he
loves nothing else. That is why reality is poison to him. That
is why he can find nowhere any fulfilment of his desires, any
end to his dreams. Everything that is not himself disgusts him
and drives him to despair. . . So long as he is alone he is happy
. . . That is why a great artist is never either a good husband or
a good father. . . One pays dearly for having been admitted to
the secrets of the gods. One only drop fallen from on high on
your brow renders you incapable of living here below1.
In our dreams [writes the idealist, tormented by the eternal
quest], in those sublime conceptions which yet must often
seem ridiculous to the masses, we never feel the most simple
difficulties, our courage is ready to brave the thunderbolt of
heaven; but if we have to take but two steps, say a few words,
approach, in fact, earthly life in its daily occurrences, we sink
with fatigue. . . To dream is to be of another world, but it is not
to be ignorant or mad. There is only madness if we think we
can apply the laws of our dreams or of our synthesis to the
analysis of life down here; but everyone is obliged to fall into
that mistake in the beginning. Some stay in it, and those are
feeble, incomplete beings, but full of gentle poetry and misfor-
tunes. Others, having recognized their youth, and not under-
standing this sublime warning of Heaven, imagine that all is
finished; that the true world is wretchedness and analysis.
These are also feeble and incomplete beings, who end by the
corruption of materialism. There are few men who have
strength enough to bear difficulties and obstacles, to decide to
enter practical life by facing it--the only one that leads to
some results--and to keep at the same time an unshakable
faith in the promises that were made to them in the day of
their delirium, when they caught a glimpse of luminous
spheres that they have never since been able to attain. They
only will do something3.
Konstanty Danielewicz, the friend who had stood
by Krasinski wTTeli~n~e~was~mobbed at the University,
joined Zygmunt in Warsaw, and went on with him to
Vienna. From this time Danielewicz, until his death,
was the devoted companion of Krasinski in his wan-
1 Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Warsaw, April 4, 1833.
2 Ibid. April 7, 1833.
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? The Sowing of the Seed
89
derings, and the one that the poet seems to have loved
best of all his friends. The misfortunes of his life were
a bond that knit Krasinski, with whom to pity was to
love, very closely to him. His philosophical intellect
strongly influenced, not altogether for the good, the
trend of Krasinski's mind during the years that they
lived together. He was a finished musician, though no
poet; and in his playing, Krasinski, who was passion-
ately fond of music, found inspiration for the struggle
of the spirits in The Undivine Comedy over Henryk's
soul1. His somewhat severe candour, and a certain want
of sympathy with Zygmunt's nervous and highly strung
temperament, never chilled their friendship, or dimin-
ished the enthusiastic admiration that Krasinski, an
idealist in his affections as elsewhere, lavished upon him.
Krasinski spent the summer in Vienna with Daniele-
wicz, undergoing medical treatment. He was in wretched
health, and the days went by for both youths in exter-
nal monotony, but, for Krasinski, in creation. He and
Danielewicz sat talking for hours of the social problems
which were at the time convulsing Europe: and it was
then that Krasinski, only able to write a few words at
a stretch in his blind condition, committed to paper The
Undivine Comedy. To antedate the words he wrote to
Gaszynski, with their foreshadowing of the promises of
Dawn, soon after The Undivine Comedy was completed:
I know that our civilization is nigh to death: I know that
the times are near when new crimes will come to punish the
old, and themselves be condemned in the sight of God--but
I know that they will create nothing, will build nothing. They
will pass like the horse of Attila, and, after them, silence. Then
1 J. Kleiner, History of the Thought of Zygmunt Krasinski. Lw6w,
1912 (Polish). See also Correspondance. Krasinski to Reeve. Warsaw,
April 9, 1833.
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? 90
The Anonymous Poet of Poland
only, that which neither you nor anyone knows or understands
will come upon us, rise from the chaos, and build the new
world from the Divine Will, from the predestiny of the human
race; but then both your and my bones shall be somewhere
dust1.
In the October of 1833 Krasinski published under
false initials his Agay Han.
He had begun this story in Geneva. The Tartar
page, Agay Han, is in love with Maryna, the widow
of the false Demetrius. After her husband's death,
Maryna has taken refuge in a castle, where the Mus-
covite boyars capture her, and cast her into prison.
She is rescued by the page; but she gives her hand to
Zarucki, who had defended the castle before it fell.
Panting for revenge, Agay Han follows them with
Russian troops, slays the husband, and drowns both
Maryna and himself.
This, the last work of Krasinski's immaturity, lacks
interest. Begun when the author's nerves had gone to
pieces during his sufferings in Geneva2, the style of the
first part is weak and over coloured. Before the story
ends the errors of manner are pruned away, and after
the earlier chapters the rest of the work, says Dr Kal-
lenbach, shows a decided step forward in the poet's
powers3. There is, however, so great a gulf between
Agay Han and its successor--the masterpiece of
matured genius which as The Undivine Comedy will live
with the Polish language--that it is hard to realize
they were written, and with no intermediate degrees,
by the same hand.
In the autumn Krasinski wandered, still with
1 Letters to Konstanty Gaszynski. Rome, Jan. 17, 1834.
s J. Kallenbach, Zygmunt Krasinski.
3 Op. cit.
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